Captain William Kidd, pirate: rum, fact, and fiction

May 23, 1701: 

Captain William Kidd is fed rum and brandy until he cannot stand and paraded in a cart through the streets of London as hysterical crowds scream and cheer. He is hanged, but the rope breaks, depositing him in a heap of mud, while other condemned men swing overhead. Still in a drunken stupor, he is pulled dripping from the slop and hanged a second and final time. 

His corpse is tarred and placed in a cage and hung on the Thames shorleline as a warning to pirates, where it would remain for nearly two years. An epitaph as abominable for its poetry as for its sentiment is nearby:

Reader, near this Tomb don't stand 

Without some Essence in thy Hand; 

For here Kidd's stinking Corpse does lie, 

The Scent of which may infect thy!!

There is no question Kidd was a pirate, since he was hired for that job by King William III himself. In their charges, the government claimed that his piracy strayed beyond  approved targets -- that is, the government felt the pinch themselves. The truth is hard to know, but it seems likely that Kidd was a scapegoat for powerful interests involved in multiple duplicities concerning the distribution of his booty.

Robert Ritchie's biography Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates unravels some strands that bind the facts of high-seas piracy with the romantic fiction that followed it. It's as lively a tale-spinning biography as Kidd himself would enjoy. The author of the Flashman series of historical fictions, George MacDonald Fraser, had words of high praise when the book was published in 1988: The most detailed record I have ever seen of a pirate voyage, with its origins and aftermath; I doubt if there is another like it.

William Kidd was born 22 January 1645. He became one of the two or three best known pirates to emerge from an era in which piracy was an enterprise as much as a threat. His checkered legacy gave rise to legends of buried treasure that still attract treasure hunters today. 

Kidd never set out to become a pirate. There is every reason to believe that his eventual trial and execution for piracy -- which has become the stuff of romantic derring-do and outfoxing authority -- was the result of an establishment cover-up, and that crucial documents that could have led to his acquittal were withheld by the British government. 

Revisiting Nader's fantasy: a world where OWS and Ayn Rand warily coexist

Forget John Galt for the moment: who is Brovar Dortwist, and does he really own a Doberman named Get 'Em? Actually, it doesn't take much to figure out this novel-without-a-key, and intentionally so. "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" (Seven Stories Press) -- the title with its quotation marks and exclamation point included -- is Ralph Nader's 736-page first novel, and he makes no bones about it: the thinly-disguised double of Grover Norquist, anti-tax advocate, is about the only real-life figure in Nader's assault on the best-seller lists who isn't named outright.

Everyone else, from Warren Buffett to Warren Beatty, gets name-checked and suitably prominent roles in Nader's self-described new fictional genre, "the practical utopia." Occupy Wall Street might see the novel's unlikely outcome of benevolent corporatism as a heart-warming holiday dream in a cold season of continuing police actions. Ayn Rand, presumably, would be preparing Nader Shrugged.

How much of a utopia does the lifelong consumer advocate foresee? As described by Raffi Khatchadourian in his 2009 New Yorker Nader profile, a cast including Ted Turner, Yoko Ono, Phil Donahue and many others "act out Nader's political fantasies ... Corporations are neutered. Third parties win. America is reborn." That description bears more than a passing resemblance to what many people expected in the first months of an Obama presidency, and it would be a quite a reward considering Nader's own political achievements in the 2008 Presidential campaign: the New Yorker takes a bit of glee in providing the exact figure of five-tenths and six-hundredths of one percent of the popular vote.

Presumably, on his days off, the candidate was dreaming of that practical utopia and putting the finishing touches on his ultimate what-if novel.

"Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us!" is written in the peculiar style of airport-book fiction -- Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol come easily to mind -- in description that is rich in adjectives but flattens out like the Nebraska prairie outside Warren Buffett's picture window:

"In the cozy den of the large but modest house in Omaha where he has lived since he started on his first billion, Warren Buffett watched the horrors of Hurricane Katrina unfold on television in early September 2005. . . . On the fourth day, he beheld in disbelief the paralysis of local, state, and federal authorities unable to commence basic operations of rescue and sustenance, not just in New Orleans, but in towns and villages all along the Gulf Coast. . . He knew exactly what he had to do. . ."

"Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" arrived in 2009 -- a bit of relief in an overheated season of screaming over health care and other such minor scrapes. Occupy Wall Street was a season or two ahead in public response to the economic bubble burst. Ironically, it's entirely possible that some unexpected real-life events may have just seemed too much even for Nader's manual Underwood typewriter to imagine. (When an electrical storm once knocked power out at his home, Nader continued typing the pages by candlelight.)

Nader's unlikely utopia is, of course, meant to scratch the itch of any political reader -- the fact that the lifelong crusader for consumer rights sees the triumph of corporations is admittedly a fantasy, no matter how benevolent.

And whether such a future is fulfilling or frustrating depends on how much one heeds the siren call of talk-show radio hosts who have their own fantasy take on political reality.

In a courteous gesture, Nader alerted many of the book's real-life counterparts to their supporting roles in his novel; in The New Yorker, Nader reported that some of them "were hard to get." (One imagines Nader attempting to reach Barry Diller in China using a rotary-dial phone, but that could just be imagination.) Yoko Ono slyly asked of her character, "does she look like a tiny dragon?" And, as the New Yorker article reports, the novel's consummate baddie Grover Norquist wished Nader would have contacted him earlier, though not for the expected reason. "I don't like dogs. He should have checked," Norquist said.

In the pages of immortalizing fiction, apparently, all can be forgiven, even for political opposites. Norquist went on: "I like Ralph, and I have the warm fuzzies for him on a number of levels." That was one of the few truly surprising and civilized comments to be heard in that polarizing, long-ago season -- but, then again, it also has the ring of fictional jacket-flap copy for a book called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" -- with quotation marks, exclamation point, and all.

Cory Doctorow's "The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow": Creativity vs. copyright, or what hath Warhol wrought?

Andy, seriously clowning around

These days it is difficult to see an advertisement, surf the web, listen to pop music or watch any media without some form of artistic "appropriation." Whether it's called sampling or theft or even genius, the intentional use and layering of others' ideas is a common thread to our shared culture.

In the 1960s Andy Warhol's appropriation of Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans as subjects for art elevated America's advertising to a level of consideration that shocked some and amused others. He was the first to suggest that the nation's disposable post-war culture was something more about form than function, that America was a nation filled with everyday objects fit equally for artistic appreciation as to throw away.

It was the ultimate extension of the old saying about one man's trash -- and, for many, a new gloss on the idea of kitsch. The fact that his iconic and appropriated images continue to contain an appraised value as well as artistic worth -- although some would argue otherwise -- is, at bottom, the economic heart of current discussions about internet rights, copyright, musical sampling, and intellectual property. Cory Doctorow takes up the argument in his essay The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow that there is a fundamental disparity between proposed changes in copyright law and the creative freedom of the artist with 21st century tools.

The past, in this case, seems no guide to the future: recent print copyright changes that extend legal ownership to 75 years and beyond clash with other media decisions: the music industry is just facing up to a 1976 law that reverts ownership rights to songwriters after 35 years -- in time for the age of digital music on the internet, unforeseen all those years ago.

The projected loss of corporate revenue is one factor in the current debate, but the rights of the individual are an even more important one. The ultimate legal argument about intellectual property, of course, will hinge on financial issues: can corporate entities make a profit in the uncharted future? The artist's right to expression, if it's even considered, will pose a thornier path.

Here's an excerpt from Doctorow's essay, condensed from his address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention, which is available both in print and -- tellingly -- available as a free download. As Doctorow points out, the decision is one in which -- perhaps for the first time -- the artist can have an activist role:

... we're all of us trying to influence the future, or the present, or our view of the past. Writing about humanity's relationship with technology is an activist pursuit, because it requires that you take a stand on how things really are, or ought to be. We live in a technological society, and it is impossible to write about technological change without writing about social change.

... If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.

This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.

And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well. ...

Warhol, the media outsider, was eventually subsumed by a culture that said "yes! of course!" to his vision as a single artist. The struggle these days seems to be how intellectual property can still be maintained in a multimedia universe that makes accesibility free, to millions, at the click of a mouse. The jury's still out about intellectual property rights, even as all sides -- individuals and corporations -- continue to deliberate furiously with a Supreme Court battle looming somewhere ahead in the uncertain future.

An open letter to Cooper Union on the fate of St. Mark's Bookshop

St. Mark's Bookshop in New York is a landmark that has been the literary and spiritual home to a generation of young writers since it opened in 1977. In the current economic climate it was perhaps inevitable that the bookshop's future would become a question of rent receipts and other business considerations. The rising cost of city real estate has forced Cooper Union to consider raising the Bookshop's rent to current rates -- when the current rent is difficult enough to maintain.

The New York Daily News reported that the shop's owners have done "as much belt-tightening as we can do": Since last year, the owners have laid off most of their part-time staff, dramatically slashed the hours of their full-time workers and taken a 50% pay-cut.

The last time the two sides met, in early 2010, Cooper Union was unwilling to budge on the rent, which is currently $20,000 a month.

The website Jeremiah's Vanishing New York reports this week on the continuing fiscal threat to St. Mark's. A decision was expected to be announced Friday, but apparently has been delayed: the St. Mark's Books rent decision won't come today. The owners tell me that Cooper is giving the request "serious consideration," have referred the matter to Finance, "and we should expect to hear back from them by the end of October." That means there's still time to buy lots of books and boost the shop's sales and spirits.

In an earlier post the blog's curator, Jeremiah Moss, noted the change in municipal and university attitudes:

What has changed in this city since 1997 that Cooper Union could permit St. Mark's Bookshop to fail in hard times? What has changed that Cooper Union, where people who ostensibly value "matters of the mind," would not value its neighboring bookstore enough to keep it alive and thriving? What has changed that the East Village could become a university neighborhood (Cooper, NYU, SVA) without its own high-quality bookstore?

In 1997, Columbia's provost stated: "It is especially important, it seems to me, that universities offer some form of support to keep this kind of bookstore in existence."

So what has changed in this city between 1997 and today? (And it's not just about Apple and Amazon.)

Terry McCoy and Bob Contant,

owners of St. Mark's

Here is an open letter Moss recently posted to Cooper Union that outlines the current situation. In a subsequent post Moss indicated the petition to maintain St. Marks has now been endorsed with 34,000 signatures.

Dear Cooper Union:

Today you are meeting with the owners of the St. Mark's Bookshop to discuss a rent reduction that would keep this invaluable business afloat. So far, the owners say, you have not been "particularly sympathetic" to the situation.

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 1994 when you leased a gas station to the Bowery Bar, helping to set in motion a tsunami of hyper-gentrification. Bowery Bar's neighbor (gone now) put a lighted sign in his window saying, "Cooper Union: How could you do this to us?" More protesters responded, "Don't Party on the Poor." But the party raged on.

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 2000 when you leased the Astor Place parking lot for a luxury hotel that turned into a luxury condo tower--one that opened the door for more massive development in the East Village. One of your own faculty members at the time told the Observer, "[Peter Cooper] would die again if he knew what was going on. For him to find out what his legacy turned out to be, he would be appalled. He was never one for pure mercenary gain. It’s all about money, money, money."

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 2001 when you tried to demap Taras Shevchenko Place and the Ukrainians of the East Village fought back.

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 2004 when you painted over a popular 9/11 mural to make space for advertising on 35 Cooper Square. That little building was later sold to developers and demolished against more protests.

You aren't being particularly sympathetic now in your current plans to turn Astor Place into a corporate office park. The neighborhood has been fighting those plans for the past decade to no avail.

Even though, as we understand it, you make a mint on the Chrysler Building, which stands on your property and reportedly costs the city $8 million every year, you keep finding ways to make more money from the East Village. As New York Magazine put it, you have "helped to corporatize a once raffish and still artistically fertile area." People are angry. We have lost too much. We cannot lose one of the best bookstores in the city--a place that fuels the soul in an increasingly soulless neighborhood.

As of this writing, more than 24,000 people have signed the petition to save St. Mark's Bookshop. Will you be sympathetic to that enormous outcry? I hope you will surprise us and grant their request, but your track record does not inspire optimism.

A few years ago, I was inspired by a story in the documentary film Twilight Becomes Night. A group of Upper West Siders saved their local pharmacy from eviction by calling the bank that planned to move into the space, and telling them, "We will not use your services." The bank backed off. Suba Pharmacy still stands. So here's an idea: If St. Mark's Books is forced to close due to unyielding rent, whatever business moves into their space at 31 Third Avenue will be boycotted and protested by the thousands of people who read this blog and all the blogs connected to it. Nothing will thrive there --no bank, no cupcake shop, no kitten adoption center.

I'm sorry, but I can't be more sympathetic.

Sincerely,
Vanishing New York

(file photo of McCoy and Contant from The New York Daily News)

Debt and taxes: "The Character of Presidents," by E.L. Doctorow

"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."

(President Barack Obama, January 20, 2009)

"Giving our all to a difficult task': The thirty months of Obama's historic presidency have seen the country change not dramatically enough for some Democrats, and -- from Republican detractors -- raising the idea of his outright llegitimacy to hold the Presidential office and upping partisan rhetoric to new levels of Marxist-socialist scaremongering.

In his calm demeanor, his refusal to be riled, and his seeming deliberate pace, Obama confounds both parties. In other words, by being "presidential," politicians and the public have found in Barack Obama a confusing cypher. Perhaps in this hyperkinetic age America has come to expect change to happen overnight, and its leaders to be superheroes. But the president is not the FDR many of his supporters hoped he would be, and the change he brought is, paradoxically, too much for some.

Writing in The Nation during the election year of 1992, author E.L. Doctorow mused at length about the idea of Presidential character during the campaign. Now, in the middle of the current budget standoff, increasingly a frustrating, partisan battle, Doctorow's words seem worth repeating.

... The President we get is the country we get. With each new President the country is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kind of lawlessness that governs our lives and invokes our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. One four-year term may find us at reasonable peace with one another, working things out, and the next, trampling on each other for scraps of bread.

That a President is inevitably put forward and elected by forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored and multigendered millions, as an act of faith, fingers crossed, a kind of prayer. ...

Who would not wish for someone, first of all, who realizes that once elected, he cannot be the President merely of the constituency that empowered him but, if he would fill the defining role of the office, a President on behalf of everyone? That is a simple grade-school concept, and, given the relation in America of money to politics, cannot be anything more than that.

But the President who has the courage to live by that would immediately lead a reformist movement to erase the advantages big money accords to itself by its political contributions and its lobbying. This would presume a morally intelligent President as well as a courageous one.

I would wish for a developed historical sense in the President, one that could understand and honestly acknowledge that the political philosophy of what we lovingly call the free market has in the past justified slavery, child labor, the gunning down of strikers by state militias, and so forth. I would want a presidential temperament keen with a love of justice and with the capacity to recognize the honor of humble and troubled people. And the character of mind to understand that even the borders of the nation are too small for the presidential service -- that willy-nilly and ipso facto (idea that) we're planetary blunderers now.

The true President would have the strength to widen the range of current political discourse, and would love and revere language as the best means we have to close in on reality. That implies a sensibility attuned to the immense moral consequence of every human life. Perhaps a sense of tragedy that would not let him sleep the night through. Also, I should think he would be someone who really likes kids, who laughs to be around them, and who is ready to die for them -- but who would never resort to the political expediency of saying so.

... the raising of the idea of character in the public mind may finally be a great service to the electorate that we imagine by contrast ... what the character of a true American President should be."

In the current stalemate of political will, both sides appear to be playing politics as if compromise is something for the other side. "The President we get is the country we get:" If the President hasn't the style to shape the country's political will in the way of an F.D.R., most of his supporters would be happy with at least an echo of Harry S Truman: "give 'em hell, Barack."

Yet in this continued recession and need for solutions, neither party is making points with the electorate that they are there to serve. The bipartisan "Gang of Six" say they have agreed on a plan which contains a stopgap measure raising the debt limit but also, because of the continued delay, cannot be completed and voted on by August 2. This will require a timetable that pushes a final vote down the road, and the country will go through this entire tent show again in a Presidential election year.

The ultimate irony is that the plan is largely made up of elements modeled "on the recommendations last year of a bipartisan fiscal commission established by Mr. Obama," as theNew York Times reported today.

The entire process has been an embarrassment to the representatives of both parties as they play a needless game of tag-you're-it. With no real recovery in sight (only another election cycle on the horizon that ensures the current rhetoric will only become hotter) Obama will need to demonstrate that he truly can be, in Doctorow's phrase, "a morally intelligent President as well as a courageous one."

(E.L. Doctorow, "The Character of Presidents," was originally published in 1992 and reprinted in The Best of the Nation, 2000)

Murdoch's Wall St. Journal makes (exclamation) points

Television station employee meeting Rupert Murdoch, who has just become his boss: "So how do you like America, mate?"

Rupert: "I'm just here for the money ... mate."

(my one and only brief exchange with Rupert Murdoch, 1995)

The UK reaction to how Murdoch's News of the World tabloid got its stories (phone hacking, bribery, public embarrassment, staged shame) has been a refreshing jolt of public moral outrage this summer -- and shocking enough that his giant bid to take full control of media outlet BSkyB has been withdrawn.

It's hard to remember the last time a government told a corporation "we don't want your filthy money, now go away."

That in itself is some ssurprising news. But there's no doubt Rupert, the sly fox himself, has lots of other opportunities to make more cash once the public indignation dies away.

He's embedded firmly in the US. He's here for the money, and how. Old news here -- but in case you missed it, The Wall Street Journal (and Dow Jones, too) is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The Page Three cutie in a bikini hasn't appeared -- yet-- but Rupert's reign has been long enough that the not-so-subtle shift in the paper's focus to attract non-WSJ readers is blazingly apparent now.

Not just the color on the front page, but the newfangled Personal Journal section and its breathless reports on Michael Jackson videos and "La Mode Berlin" fashion trends is .... well, not your grandfather's WSJ (whose interest in fashion probably extended to wondering where in blue blazes gingham dresses went).

The Journal has always been conservative in its fiscal and political outlook. Now readers of the WSJ are faced with culture-war opinion pieces like Peggy Noonan's odd July 4th take on Thomas Jefferson as "cold" and yet admiring his "warm-hearted" words struck from the Constitution -- no matter which angle you disagree with Peggy on that one, she wants you to be wrong.

News Corp ought to just add exclamation points to all of its opinion page headlines and be done with it. Wednesday's opinion page carried a bold top-of-the-fold headline guaranteed to make any reader out for liberal blood smile knowingly: "Journalism Needs Government Help," the headline reads over a guest column written by Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University.

After an extended season of bank bailouts, auto company bailouts, mortgage messes and scary "Obama becomes your doctor" health-care scenarios, the WSJ's headline writers must figure any government involvement invokes the word "help" in the headline these days, no matter how benign the intent of the article.

Bollinger, author of Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century (Oxford, 2010), makes the case for a publicly-funded American news service of the press that might compete with the BBC and other global newscasters. In much the same capacity as broadcast television and radio's Public Broadcasting Service, he suggests augmenting an American World Service for the press, publicly funded, "with full journalistic independence":

"There are examples of other institutions in the U.S. where state support does not translate into official control. The most compelling are our public universities and our federal programs for dispensing billions of dollars annually for research. Those of us in public and private research universities care every bit as much about academic freedom as journalists care about a free press. ... the most problematic funding issues in academic research come from alliances with the corporate sector."

Bollinger is aware these alliances carry certain questions of reportorial balance: he writes, "all media systems, whether advertiser-based or governmental, come with potential editorial risks." He cites the current BP situation as an example where the divide between advertising, reporting, and opinion is maintained by professional standards that delineate boundaries for each.

" ... we trust our great newspapers to collect millions of dollars in advertising from BP while reporting without fear or favor on the company's environmental record only because of a professional culture that insulates revenue from news judgment."

He concludes, rightly, that American journalism is a hybrid, a mixed system of media and the

marketplace, "where the mission is to get the balance right." A government-funded American world service would compete in a global market with already-established news organizations -- and that very fear of government money-for media, of course, is the rub for the Journal,cause for another scary headline with its intimations of government takeover.

Well, no. That is not the intent of Bollinger's article, by any reading. And yet the Wall Street Journal will continue in its conservative way to find and exploit a reader's apprehension of the nation's current fiscal uncertainty. Two facing pages of Wednesday's issue carried headlines containing the phrases "Hazards," "Higher Taxes" (this even in a positive context, as in ..."Boost State Revenue"), "Slower Growth," "Divided Over Course," "Trade Gap is Biggest."

And then there's the almost-cheery-by-contrast "Scientist Says Oxygen-Depletion Problem in Gulf Is Real." The world is falling apart bit by bit under Obama. Read about it now in full color in the Journal.

The target of a free press subsidized by taxpayer funding by the president of Columbia University, apparently, is just too good for the WSJ to resist, and for the paper's headline writers to ignore.

Now some real news on the WSJ front: "Let Them Eat Foie Gras! French Food Fights Back" the banner headline reads in the Personal Journal pages. One lone exclamation point, about the resurgence of French cuisine ... you know, the politically suspect French ... so close to Bastille Day. Truly scary, non? Well, it's a beginning down the slippery slope -- the exclamation mark on the WSJ editorial page can't be far off.