The COVID-19 visitation is said to be a 100-year event.  So is the economic contraction triggered by the lockdowns imposed by state and local governments, mostly in blue states.

During the first phase of the Great Depression, 1929-1933, the U.S. economy shrank by one-third.  A stubborn adherence to wrong-headed policies brought down an economy staffed by of some of the world’s hardest working, most productive people, supplied with plentiful capital and boundless natural resources.  The policy mix — punitive tariffs, high taxes, jawboning high and inflexible wages, and a Federal Reserve grimly determined to deflate the currency and allow the banking system to go to ruin – caused an unemployment rate of 25% and a one-third drop in GDP.

It took four years to produce that outcome.  Those people were slackers.  The high-powered geniuses of 2020 managed to shrink the US economy in one calendar quarter at a rate that, had it been allowed to continue, would have matched in one year the sorrowful record of the first four years of the Great Depression.  Fortunately, saner heads began to reassert control, slowly and quietly, as the second quarter of 2020 ended.

The battle between shutting and opening has not yet been decided.

Have the benefits from this exercise in mismanagement exceeded the costs?  The dramatic percentage decline in gross domestic product does not measure the depth of the pain that the shutdown has imposed on those least able to deal with it.

Think of the anxiety suffered by a family that was fully employed in February and found itself suddenly out of work, unable to pay rent, and uncertain how to afford food, medical care, or auto repairs.  Consider the stress piled onto small business owners who had to shut down their restaurants, construction projects, and shops.  How many of them have had to abandon their dreams of independence?

Add to that the stress of parents denied the opportunity to work, who became full-time educators.  Consider the toll on patients with chronic conditions – cancer, heart disease, arthritis, to name three – who found hospitals and clinics closed except for emergencies.  Even if their clinic was open, the fear of infection from a fatal illness persuaded patients to stay away.

Economic hardship and physical isolation carry in their wake medical and psychological damage that will leave lasting scars.  The losses have not been distributed fairly, either.  Hourly workers in the service, travel, and hospitality industries have been much harder hit than, say, lawyers, government employees, and investment professionals.

What gain was achieved through the sacrifice extracted from day-to-day working people and small business owners?  The information needed to make that assessment is hard to come by.  Intentionally so, I fear.

Alex Berenson is a true resource for the conscientious citizen trying to understand this situation.  He has published two pamphlet sized chapters to what will become a longer book titled “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns”.

Berenson worked at one time as a reporter for the New York Times.  He examines data dispassionately.  And he shows his work.  Every statement he makes is accompanied by a link to the official report or scientific study that backs him up.

Yet, when he tried to sell his book on Amazon, they refused to carry it.  They would not offer anything on their site that contradicted the received wisdom of those advocates of lockdown, the CDC and the WHO[1].  Berenson got his story in front of Elon Musk, who was able to shame Amazon publicly.  The first two parts are available on Amazon because of that intervention.  I highly recommend them.  Berenson is the chief source, but not the only one, that has shaped my thinking on this subject.

The distortions and half-truths on COVID emanating from official sources are breathtaking.  To start, consider the term “case”.  I notice that cases “surge” or they “soar” or they “spike”.  I can count on one finger the number of times that I have heard a news report say that cases have merely “increased”.

But what is a case? The use of the word has been needlessly provocative.  The common meaning of the term covers individuals who display symptoms of disease.  The CDC definition counts anyone with a positive lab test as a “confirmed case” without regard to the person’s symptoms.  In fact, individuals with COVID symptoms are only “probable cases” until their status is confirmed by a test.

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/case-definition/2020/

The high number of “cases” in the U.S. is not necessarily evidence of an outbreak of disease.  It may reflect a high rate of testing, nothing more.  Further, the CDC has also told us that many of those who test positive have such low viral loads that they are not in danger of suffering symptoms and are not a risk to spread the disease.  Somewhere between one-third and one-half of infected individuals will show no symptoms.  That means that the disease is much less fatal than advertised.

We know that many people counted as fatalities died with the virus in their bodies but did not die from the disease.  The CDC has acknowledged that hospitals may have a financial incentive to code a death as related to COVID, whether or not the unfortunate patient died of the disease.  It will take years of research to unravel the mess, assuming that impartial researchers can be found who are willing to take on the task.

The website www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries provides a daily update on COVID data by country.  It shows that the United States has conducted more than 117,000,000 COVID tests and that we have had 7.9 million “cases”.  Incidentally, we can’t use that information to calculate an infection rate because many people received multiple tests.  Of the 7.9 million “cases”, almost 220,000 have resulted in death.  That doesn’t mean they died of COVID.  It means they tested positive for COVID and later died – of something.

More than 5 million are shown as “recovered”.  That leaves some 2.6 million people whose “cases” are awaiting an outcome.

What this website does not tell us, and it is one of the most informative I have found, is how many of the 2.6 million “cases awaiting an outcome” are symptomatic.  The only hint is in a column labeled “Serious, Critical” which shows 14,780 such cases in the U.S.  These are people currently in ICUs “if and when this figure is reported”.

A little legwork leads me to the conclusion that fewer than 75,000 of the 2,600,000 “cases awaiting an outcome” require aggressive intervention.  The detailed daily report from Illinois on their hospital bed and ICU bed usage for COVID patients indicates that total ICU usage in that state for COVID is around 400 beds (a little less in fact) and the total of hospitalizations for COVID is around 2200 beds (including ICU).  (For context, Illinois has more than 30,000 hospital beds and nearly 4,000 ICU beds.  The Illinois system is not being overwhelmed by COVID cases.) Use that same ratio on the nationwide numbers and we find that around 67,000 people are in hospitals for COVID.

https://www.dph.illinois.gov/covid19/hospitalization-utilization

Everyone else included in the 2,600,000 “cases awaiting an outcome”, more than 2,500,000 individuals, is well enough to stay out of a hospital.  That does not seem like an uncontrollable outbreak.

The question, again, is whether this is a problem so severe that it requires us to shut down the world’s most potent economy in order to address it.  If we stop reacting and start reflecting, a clear answer starts to emerge.

Governments may not be good at preventing the spread of the disease, but they are masters at preventing the spread of information.  Even so, we can conclude that after nearly ten months during which the virus has roamed the land, less than 2% of the population, and possibly as little as 1% of the population, have had symptoms and well less than one-fifteenth of that number have died from the disease, or from something else after testing positive.

The great majority of those who have died are over the age of 75, many of them in nursing homes.  How many of those people were healthy and vigorous?  Sorry to be grim, but how many of the over-75s who died were going to die soon of something else?  Old age is a fatal condition.

Was it worth taking a fully functioning economy to the brink of ruin to deal with a threat that has proven to be much less serious, dramatically less serious, than was at first thought?

Who decided that lockdowns were a good idea?  Berenson points out that public health agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, published guidance over recent years strongly recommending against locking an economy down in the face of an epidemic.  The agencies divide epidemics and pandemics into five categories of severity, category 1 being the least concerning.  The recommendation is against locking the economy down except for category 5 events.

In the United States, the novel coronavirus outbreak is likely a category 2 event, but may in the end prove to have been a category 1 event.  A category 2 event produces between 90,000 and 450,000 deaths in the U.S. population of 325,000,000 individuals.  Right now, 220,000 deaths have been attributed to the disease, but that count may be high because of loose standards for attributing cause of death.

Why did CDC depart from its prior guidance?  A certain British researcher named Neil Ferguson (not be confused with the estimable Niall Ferguson), a man with a very spotty forecasting record, predicted that the virus would cause 500,000 deaths in the UK and two million deaths in the United States if no action were taken.

How did he come to that conclusion?  Two key statistics are the “Case Fatality Rate” and the “Infection Fatality Rate”.  Divide the number of deaths caused by the virus by the number of people with symptoms to get the CFR, and by the number of people infected (with or without symptoms) to get the IFR.  (These definitions use “case” in its original sense to cover individuals with symptoms.)  It appears that Ferguson’s team relied on a study (among others) that looked at coronavirus deaths in the Wuhan area reported by Chinese sources to get the numerator of their equations.  To get the IFR denominator, the study on which they relied tested people returning to the UK from Wuhan.  They tested a few hundred people returning to the UK from China from a handful of flights arriving within a few days of each other.  From that information, they extrapolated to calculate the denominator, the number of infections.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf (see page 5)

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1

When Ferguson put the two together, he came to the startling conclusion that the virus was going to cause untold suffering, up to 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2,000,000 in the U.S.  In the U.S., the University of Washington was equally apocalyptic.

On the basis of these projections, many prominent public health professionals lost their nerve and abandoned their previous recommendations.  A policy that was the result of careful evaluation by teams of professionals – the very model of progressive governance by experts – was thrown out in an afternoon on the basis of some back-of-the-envelope calculations by an analyst with a poor forecasting record.

Ferguson’s numbers are flexible.  His original estimate of 500,000 deaths in the UK would drop to 20,000 if the UK government shut the economy down for a year.  Shutdown for him means: (1) quarantining anyone who is symptomatic; (2) keeping everyone else isolated in their homes; (3) shutting down schools; (4) maintaining social distancing for people who venture out of their houses.  According to Ferguson, if you do that for a year, all may yet be well.

He warned that if his advice were ignored, hospitals and ICUs would be overwhelmed by a wave of patients.  Officials imagined lines of feverish patients, many of them voters, unable to breathe on their own, requiring round the clock intensive care.  If the Ferguson numbers were correct – and a chorus soon claimed that he had underestimated the coming disaster –the U.S. medical system was about to be overwhelmed.

The immediate reaction of some U.S. state governments was to use executive emergency powers to shut down economic activity to “flatten the curve”.  The idea as originally stated was that while we can’t control the number of people who will get the disease and require treatment in hospitals and ICUs, we can spread out the demand over time to avoid crashing the ability of hospitals to meet the crisis.  A brief lockdown, fifteen days or so, would flatten the curve and avoid hospitals being overwhelmed.

The initial short-term lockdown to flatten the curve was extended.  Then, somehow, the goal of the lockdowns became something different.  Now, we are “fighting” to prevent the spread of the virus, not to slow it down.

But events have shown that we can’t stop the spread of the virus.  Nor does the spread of the virus mean that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are abroad in the land.  The vast majority of people who have symptoms have a few bad days and then recover.  The recovery rate for the most vulnerable – those over 75 – is about 95%.  It’s almost 100% for the young.  It’s roughly 99% for everyone else.

If you graph the number of deaths from an epidemic against time, you get an asymmetrical bell curve.  The left-hand side of the curve, tracing the early deaths, is nearly vertical as the virus scours the population to seek out the aged, the infirm, the ill.  After the rate of death peaks, the number of deaths in each period of time starts to fall.  Now the people being infected are younger, healthier, better able to deal with the illness.  It is still unpleasant but it is less and less fatal.  It helps that viruses are known to evolve to become less fatal.  If you are a virus trying to survive and replicate, killing your host is a losing strategy.

As Alex Berenson’s two pamphlets demonstrate, none of this is new information.  Epidemiologists have studied many disease outbreaks over long periods of time and have worked out a set of responses that can control the worst aspects of an outbreak without doing damage to the economies that provide life and sustenance to populations as they brace themselves against the onslaught of a novel disease.

No government before now has ever tried to lock down its economy in the face of an attack by a novel disease.  There was a massive flu epidemic in 1918-1920.  There was another less dramatic outbreak in the 1950s.  We had swine flu in the 1970s, avian flu in the 1990s, SARS, and H1N1 in more recent decades.  These were widespread viral epidemics that did a lot of damage.  Yet no one ever suggested shutting down a thriving economy in order to flatten a curve, much less stop the spread of a life form that has worked out over the course of countless millennia how to spread, reproduce, and increase its numbers.

There is plenty of middle ground between taking no action and watching people die and shutting an economy to fight the spread of the disease.  Many experienced medical professionals favor letting healthy people go about their business while encouraging the vulnerable to isolate when possible and to practice social distancing.

So why, in the year 2020 did so many western governments and particularly those in English-speaking countries, entrusted as they are with securing the liberty and security of their people, embark on a policy of suppressing freedom of movement and freedom of association to fight a disease?

I’ll share my speculations on that subject in another post.  Check back, please.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

[1] Just before posting this note, I saw a report that the head of WHO now recommends ending lockdowns.  WHO has proven to be susceptible to political pressure. We’ll see if they stand by this recently announced change of heart.

Wine tasting notes are notorious for their pretentiousness.  Here is an excerpt from the tasting note for a Tuscan wine that I have put aside for a few years:

[The wine] opens to an inky dark appearance followed by a thick and succulent texture. It offers a certain firmness to the tannins and a thinner spot on the mid-palate that thickens quickly as the wine hits the palate. Dark plum, prune and blackberry emerge at the top. Lighter notes of spice, smoke and tar also appear.

Here’s another typical example:

[P]roves to be better contained and more carefully etched than I would have anticipated. The bouquet starts off with black fruit and light shadings of spice, but the best part is in those mineral aromas of flint and slate.

Despite the pretense, the notes convey a lot of information to the consumer.  I don’t necessarily taste “pencil shavings, wet stones, and violets” but when I see that description, I can form a picture and have some idea what to expect if I buy.  You may not taste pencil shavings but you can figure that when this particular reviewer does taste them, the wine will, or won’t, be to your liking.  On top of that, I like to check Robert Parker and a few other sources if I am in doubt about whether a wine is ready to drink.  Parker’s Wine Advocate is reliable, which in this business is a high hurdle.

Which brings me to the strangest tasting note I have ever come across.  I stopped at a local wine shop, the old-fashioned kind with a storefront facing a sidewalk.  Inside there are two narrow corridors between intelligently stocked shelves.  I was looking for some items I had never tried before to fight against the tendency to stay with the familiar.

I picked up a wine from Provence.  I wish I had written down the name, but I have forgotten it.  I left it on its side for a few days, opened it, and poured a glass.  When I put my nose into the glass, there was the definite odor of – and here I pause to try to find the word that Robert Parker might use had he reviewed this wine – here it is: barnyard. 

I hesitated to taste the wine.  I mean, I wanted to get off the well-trodden path, but within reasonable limits.

I tried it.  It did not taste at all the way it smelled.  It was quite nice. 

I wondered if I had a bad bottle.  I checked Robert Parker, but he had not reviewed the wine. Several amateur reviewers had left notes at cellatracker.com.  One of the notes said the wine had the aroma of “salty poo.”

I gave you the word “barnyard” a moment ago to avoid crude terms but also to avoid something an eight-year-old might use.  The cellar tracker people made their own editorial judgment, something that reasonable people might differ on and remain friends.

But where on earth did “salty” come from?  I refuse to believe that it comes from the lived experience of the reviewer.  If there are people who use salt in that particular way, surely they are not taking notes on the odor so that it will be front of mind if they ever come across a wine whose aroma merits that description.

The passing scene grows stranger by the day.

During some eighteen months in 1825 and 1826, following a serious illness that nearly killed him, Beethoven wrote his final musical compositions in a last burst of creative energy.  He turned to the string quartet, a form he had not worked with since 1811.  Written in near total silence, these final works continue to generate an air of mystery, profundity, and power.  Opus 131, the next-to-last in order of composition, was a personal favorite of the composer.  One of its many notable features is that it contains seven movements, played through without the traditional pause between movements.  For this work, the composer canceled the brief moments of repose when the musicians re-establish their tuning and the audience delivers the coughs that have been, or should have been, suppressed while the music was playing.

Josef Haydn popularized, some say he invented, the string quartet in the 1760s.  The quartet’s components – two violins, a viola, and a cello – have remained stable over more than 250 years.  One appeal of the string quartet to listeners over that long span of time is the similarity of the instruments to human voices.  They both use a vibrating cord to produce a sound with a transparent quality unlike any other instrument, one by passing air over vocal cords, the other by passing a bow over strings. 

The ranges of the instruments match familiar voice types: the violin with the soprano, the viola with the tenor, and the cello with the baritone. However, the human voice has a range of about two octaves, while the string instruments can manage a range in excess of four octaves.  Each instrument in a string quartet can reach notes that are considerably higher, and in some cases a little lower, than the corresponding human voice.

The quartet’s limited forces present a challenge to the composer.  In a symphony orchestra, the strings, woodwinds, and brass can toss a theme from section to section or can combine to produce moments of drama.  The percussion instruments can underpin a line, add emphasis to big moments or mystery to quiet ones.  The extra octave of depth afforded by bass violins can hit an audience right in the gut.

None of that is available to the composer for string quartet.  Although the variation in tone that can be produced by these instruments is prodigious – the strings can be plucked, they can be bowed up or down, near the bridge, near the fingerboard, and with more or less pressure, while the left hand can use vibrato or the lack of it – the composer who writes for the string quartet accepts severe limitations that can be avoided with other platforms.

A couple of years ago, I listened to all of the string quartets that Haydn wrote in his maturity.  I started with his Opus 20, leaving out a batch of early and in some cases spurious works.  That still left 45 compositions.  They are full of surprises.  You think a melody is heading for a particular note and he pulls a fast one.  Anticipated harmonies fail to appear and are replaced with the unexpected. 

He almost never delivers surprises in the form of the compositions.  All the string quartets are four movements long. (I am not counting his Opus 51, a transcription of a religious work for orchestra.)  With one exception (that I can recall, working from fallible memory) all of the first movements are in traditional sonata-allegro form.  The second movements are slow.  The third movements are dances, either minuets or scherzos, although occasionally second and third movements are switched.  The fourth and final movement may be in any of several forms, including sonata, rondo, and fugue, which was a Haydn specialty.

Haydn published most of his quartets in batches of six.  Five of these would be in major keys and one, but only one, would be in a minor key.  Mozart was so impressed by Haydn’s example that he dedicated a set of six quartets to his older friend.  The published set included a heartfelt dedication to Haydn, which has produced the odd result that the nicknamed “Haydn” quartets were composed by Mozart.  Mozart stayed with tradition.  All of these quartets (as well as other, less notable, compositions for string quartet apart from some juvenile compositions) have four movements.  He did innovate a bit.  The finale of one quartet (D minor, the second of the Haydn quartets) and the (third) slow movement of another (A major, the fifth in the set) are composed as variations on a theme.  But Mozart was not an iconoclast.  He stayed with traditional forms, using them to waft a haze of grace and facility over the intellectual power and emotional depth of his music.

Beethoven composed sixteen pieces for string quartet, produced in three distinct periods of his creative career.  In his youth, he was a student of Haydn’s.  This was a relationship that neither found comfortable.  Still, Beethoven’s early string quartets, his Opus 18, were published as a set of six with the requisite one in a minor key.  They have a Haydnesque quality.  I question whether they would still be performed as frequently if they had been written by someone else.

Five more quartets followed in Beethoven’s “middle” period.  These were composed between 1806 and 1811 at a time when the composer was producing some of his most famous and monumental symphonies, piano concertos, and piano sonatas.  They represent a dramatic leap forward from the first six compositions.  The melodies are more intricate, the harmonies more complex, and the technical demands on the musicians more stringent.  Beethoven sends the first violinist further up the fingerboard than did his predecessors. Even so, Beethoven kept the four-movement structure that had been handed down to him.  The one feature that suggested he might experiment with form in the future is that in four of these five quartets there are two movements that are linked together without a pause.  It was only a matter of time before the composer thought “Why not run all the movements together, and why stop at four?”

The first and last of the final five quartets (five with an asterisk[1]) are in the traditional four movement mode.  These are Opus 127 in Eb major and Opus 135 in F major.  Opus 127 was the first Beethoven string quartet I ever heard.  It was performed in concert by the Borodin Quartet on an American tour during a thaw in the Cold War.  At the end of the second movement, in which a slow wandering melody is put through a series of transformations, the musicians were visibly moved.  They must have gone through it thousands of times in rehearsal and performance, but it still got to them.

After hearing Opus 127, I wanted to hear all of the others.  The only way to do that was through recordings.  Then as now I thought that Deutsche Gramophone has some of the best sound engineers going.  DGG had recently produced recordings of the complete Beethoven quartets performed by the Amadeus Quartet.  There is a certain irony in that connection.  Three of the quartet’s members were Austrian Jews who in 1938 left for England when their country voted enthusiastically and overwhelmingly to unite with Germany, then governed by Hitler and his National Socialist party.

From my first hearing of Opus 131, it has been among my favorites, although my feelings for it, like other works by this composer, are born of reverence rather than affection.  The first movement is a fugue built on a slow theme that announces in four notes the seriousness of the piece to follow.  After seven minutes of intricate counterpoint, we move to a shorter dance-like movement with (to my ear) Gaelic overtones.  The third movement, only some 45-50 seconds long, leads to the long fourth movement, the emotional heart of the piece.  This movement, about twice as long as either of the two outside movements, is built on a serenade-like theme that is turned inside out as it is put through seven variations (the last of which is not completed).  When the theme re-emerges at the end, the serenade has become a drunken march.  The fifth movement is a rapid-fire scherzo, not labeled as such.  It elides into the short, mournful sixth movement, whose principal theme sounds vaguely Hebraic to my ear.  The seventh movement, about as long as the first, is the only segment of the composition written in traditional sonata form.  Its first subject is a demonic march.  The second, gentler, subject gurgles in the instruments’ lower registers before soaring skyward.  At the end, the first subject leads to a coda that ends with an affirming, four-octave C# major chord.

All recorded performances that I have heard are flawless, so the choice depends on your taste in the recorded sound of string instruments and your preference for tempos.  Sound styles vary tremendously.  Some recordings give the impression that the listener is seated at the back of an ancient stone church where the sound bounces off the walls.  Others put the listener’s ear inches away from the instruments.  A middle course is best, and I give high marks to recordings that produce a certain transparent sound. 

The Amadeus Quartet recorded the late Beethoven quartets in the mid-1960s.  Their recordings remain my favorite and my reference set.  Their tone, intonation, ensemble, and emotional commitment have never been surpassed in my opinion.  On top of that, I don’t think you can beat the sound engineering that DG provides to these artists.

I mentioned that the group was formed by three Jewish violinists who each fled Austria for England in the late 1930s.  They didn’t know each other at the time.  When Britain went to war in September 1939, the government placed some “friendly aliens” in holding camps.  The three ran into each other over time, became friends, and ultimately came to the notice of a distinguished teacher who took them on at no charge, once they were removed from detention.  They decided that their talents were suited to the string quartet literature, but they were short a violist and had one violinist too many.  Peter Schidlof converted to the viola – he had to learn how to read the tenor clef, where the middle line of the staff denotes C4, middle C.  The group was joined by Martin Lovett, an English cello prodigy, a few years younger than the Austrians.  After practicing for years, they gave their first performance in 1947.  The group vowed that if any of them left or died, they would not attempt to continue but would disband.  The promise was called in when in 1988 Schidlof, the converted violist, died at 65 suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack.  The youngest member of the group, the cellist Martin Lovett, died in April of this year at 93 from COVID-19.

Among quartets that are still performing, I like the Alexander Quartet, a mature group, and the Danish String Quartet, who are earlier in their career.  The Alexanders produce a beautiful clear neutral sound.  The instruments that they use in their Beethoven recordings – modern instruments on loan from a charitable trust – undoubtedly contribute to that impression.  The violins and the cello were built using forms that come down from Stradivarius.  (The artisan, Francis Kuttner, used his own form for the viola.)  The wood used to produce the instruments comes from two trees.  All of the horizontal pieces used for these instruments come from one tree, while all of the vertical pieces come from another.  It’s impossible to know whether the common source of the physical components of the instruments adds to the sense of sonic unity.  Their performance of Opus 131 is among the very best, in my opinion.

The Danish Quartet has adopted the nice practice of switching the two violins, depending on the piece.  (The Emerson Quartet does this as well.)  They can be seen and heard on YouTube.  I was interested to see that when Frederik Øland is second violin (see, e.g., Opus 59, No. 1) he is the clear leader of the group, using eye contact and body motion (limited to be sure) to enhance the group’s already impressive focus.  In Opus 131, he is first violin and plays most of the piece drawn inward, with eyes closed, taking inspiration from his compadres but not engaging with them.  One other comment about the DSQ.  I don’t know how many other quartets are named for countries (I can think of Quartetto Italiano and the Hungarian String Quartet), but I would be willing to wager that none of them is more stereotypical in appearance of the natives of the country for which they are named than the DSQ is of Denmark.  (The cellist is Norwegian as it happens.)

Opus 131 plays a supporting role in the movie “A Late Quartet,” which explores the lives and loves of the members of a string quartet as they maneuver through a number of crises.  The second violin and the viola are husband and wife.  Their marriage is strained by the husband’s wandering eye (among other body parts).  Their daughter, a conservatory student and a gifted violinist, is having a secret affair with the first violinist, an obsessive who focuses on the perfection of his technique rather than the music. 

The cellist, the most interesting character of the four, is coming to grips with the end of his performing career due to a medical condition that will cause his left hand to deteriorate.  He solves the problem, Hollywood style, during a concert performance of Opus 131.  At the end of the sixth movement, he stops the music, announces his retirement and introduces his replacement.  She is a young woman who arrives on stage carrying a cello.  She takes the seat that has just been vacated and the newly formed quartet resumes the performance at the start of the seventh movement.  Plug and play.  Simple.  Throughout the movie, we have heard snippets of Opus 131 performed by the Brentano String Quartet.  In a nice self-referential twist, the musician who joins the quartet at the end is the Brentano’s cellist.

Franz Schubert first heard the quartet performed in November 1828.  He is reported to have said that he would like to hear the piece performed on his deathbed.  His timing was close.  He died five days later.  While I make no medical claims, I have listened to the piece many times with no ill effects and can enthusiastically recommend it to readers who may not be familiar with it.

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[1] The asterisk comes in because a movement was withdrawn from the original design of Opus 130 in Bb major.  This work, in six movements, is reminiscent of a Bach dance suite, translated into Beethoven’s idiom.  The similarity ends when you get to the original sixth and final movement, a gigantic dissonant fugue that erases all memories of the dance motifs that have preceded it.  Beethoven’s publisher persuaded him to pull the fugue out of the quartet.  It was published as a separate stand-alone movement under the title “Grosse Fugue” and given Opus No. 133.  Beethoven arranged the piece for two pianos, four hands and gave it Opus No. 134.  Then he composed a new final movement for Opus 130.  The sixth movement of Opus 130 is Beethoven’s last composition.  Some modern quartets think that Beethoven should never have pulled the fugue and perform Opus 130 with the original sixth movement.  The Grosse Fugue is a magnificent work.  This listener thinks it belongs on its own.

I see that Chris Wallace wants to interview Joe Biden as a bookend to his interview of Donald Trump.  Mr. Wallace has a reputation as a tough interviewer, but I have noticed that he is a tiger only when he faces right.  He is a pussycat when questioning those on the left.  I have tried to imagine the questions that Mr. Wallace has prepared for the interview with the former vice president:

Mr. Vice President, in your two previous national campaigns in 2008 and 2012 you were working side by side with your friend Barak Obama.  What’s it like running your own campaign without having Mr. Obama at your side?

Mr. Vice President, I want to explore your family relationships. Your son Beau followed in your footsteps as a dedicated public servant when his life was tragically cut short by cancer.  Much earlier, when you were first elected to Congress, you lost a child and your first wife in a terrible traffic accident.  How have these tragic deaths affected you, your family, and your conduct in office?

Mr. Vice President, let’s talk about foreign policy.  As Barak Obama’s second in command, you had occasion to deal with numerous world leaders, many of whom are still in office.  As you know, Mr. Trump’s critics point out that America’s relations with the world are at an all-time low.  How would you use your experience to improve America’s relationship with friends in Europe, neighbors in North America, and even potential adversaries like Russia and China?

All right, Mr. Vice President, I’d like to get into the specifics of some of the controversies that you have been associated with.  Looking at Ukraine specifically, how would you contrast your behavior with that of Donald Trump, who was of course impeached over his attempt to influence Ukraine’s president?

Mr. Vice President, you support the Black Lives Matter organization.  How do you think your experience in the civil rights movement and your lifetime of support for African Americans will help you improve race relations in this country?

Mr. Vice President, you have laid out a bold seven-point plan for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic that has crippled the U.S. economy.  Donald Trump’s response to your criticism has been that he has already implemented each of the proposals you have made.  Can you explain how your plan will improve the situation when compared with the president’s inaction on COVID-19?

Well, Mr. Vice President, I’m afraid we have time for only one more question, so I’ll be brief.  Is there anything you would like to say to the Wall of Moms and the Wall of Vets who are defending the right to peaceful protest in places like Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington?

Mr. Biden’s advisers are reported to have declined the interview.  It’s understandable.  Why take the chance that Mr. Biden might say something that could be taken out of context and used against him?

This is an adaptation of a conventional recipe.  The original called for sautéing boneless, skinless chicken breasts “until done”, removing them from the skillet, and then preparing a pan sauce.  Whenever I sauté chicken breasts, I feel I am walking a fine line between a dry stringy overcooked product and the pale pink-in-the-center threat of salmonella that comes from undercooking.  Neither alternative is acceptable, and the transition time between the two is short.

It occurred to me yesterday, after having prepared this dish perhaps fifty times if not more, that I could arrange for perfectly cooked chicken by using my sous vide machine and adapting the recipe.

Ingredients:

Two or three skinless, boneless chicken breasts, about 8 ounces each. (I removed the tenderloins.  Someone should tell the chickens, politely, that we don’t need them.)

One tablespoon of butter plus one and a half tablespoons of olive oil.

One-half cup all-purpose flour

Ten or so grinds of both salt and pepper

Sauce:

Two garlic cloves, chopped fine

Zest of one lemon

One tablespoon of lemon juice

One cup of chicken stock (home-made if possible)

One cup of roughly chopped basil leaves.

Note – all measurements are approximate and can be varied to suit.

Method:

I cooked three boneless skinless chicken breasts sous vide at 150º F for 75 minutes.

After removing the breasts from the sous vide immersion, I dried them by patting lightly with a paper towel and dredged them lightly in flour that had been seasoned with the salt and pepper.  Any loose flour will burn in the pan, so I shook each breast to get rid of excess flour. I melted the butter and oil in a sauté pan over medium heat.  When oil and butter were hot, I added the chicken and cooked for 90 seconds on a side – just enough to produce a slight crust and some brown color.  (The sous vide immersion cooked the chicken, so the sauté is for aesthetics and mouthfeel.)

I put the chicken aside and made the sauce.  I lowered the heat slightly and added the garlic, cooking for 30 seconds, then the lemon zest, cooking for only a few seconds, then the lemon juice until it sizzled and finally the chicken stock.  I increased the heat to bring the whole thing to a boil and let it reduce to about half.  It was still quite thin, but I decided that was OK.

If you like a thicker sauce, you could try beating in a couple of tablespoons of butter, or you could put a small amount of sauce in a bowl with perhaps a teaspoon of corn starch, stir together until smooth, then add to the sauce and stir to thicken.  I thought it was fine as is.

I added the basil to the pan and stirred to combine.  At that point, the sauce can come off the heat.   I sliced the chicken three-quarters of an inch thick and then spooned some sauce over it.

I served it with long-grain brown rice and a vegetable, which someone said was called a zucchini if I have the name right.

The breasts were perfectly cooked through, juicy, tender.  I don’t think the chicken needed 75 minutes and it might have been just as good at a slightly lower temperature.  Next time I will lower the temperature two degrees to 148º F and cook for 60 minutes.

I thought a young Chianti went well with the chicken.   (Then again, I would drink a red Tuscan wine or one from Bordeaux with anything that didn’t swim.)

I am fond of a post I published on July 4, 2014. Here it is again with some revisions and updates.  As attacks on America’s heritage intensify – both attacks on morale such as the 1619 Project and physical attacks by mob action against monuments, public spaces, and the peace and security of citizens – I thought it worthwhile to repost these thoughts as a way to reach out to readers who have not written off the American enterprise.  There are ironies and tensions in our founding, to be sure, but not the nihilism, ignorance, or ill-will of the mob or of those who incite them.

The Great Seal of the United States contains the Latin expression: Novus Ordo Seclorum.  A new order for the ages.  That new order began on July 4, 1776. The date marks the first time in human history that one people founded a nation upon the principle that all human beings are equal.  The event is not without its curiosities.

July 2, 1776 might have been the national birthday.  On that date, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution that Richard Henry Lee of Virginia had introduced on June 7:

Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Independence had been enacted.  John Adams, an early advocate for independence, thought the act of July 2 accomplished his purpose. The next day he wrote to his wife Abigail, who was home in Massachusetts (spelling and punctuation untouched):

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

It’s easy to make fun of Adams for predicting the wrong date for the national birthday, but he was prescient apart from the date.  There has been, every year since 1776, a great “anniversary Festival” resounding with fireworks over a territory that expanded until it reached from one end of the continent to the other and beyond, although we may have to put an asterisk next to 2020.  And, whatever the individuals may think who have broken windows, repurposed retail inventories, pulled down or defaced statues, and taken possession of public spaces, there has been something worth celebrating.

Independence was enacted on July 2, but not yet declared.  So, one curiosity is why Adams wrote his letter on July 3 and not July 5.  He knew the content of the Declaration.  He was one of the committee of five (Jefferson, Adams, Ben Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman) that had been deputed to work up the document.  He and Ben Franklin had reviewed Jefferson’s initial draft with the author.  The committee presented the document to Congress on June 28.  Congress began editing the document during the afternoon of July 2, after passing the Lee resolution.  They had not finished at the time Adams was writing his letter to Abigail.

The editorial process ended on July 4 with the decision to publish the document.  This was not the first time in history that a significant, indeed a monumental, political action was marked by the publication of a legal document.  English history is punctuated by such documents, including Magna Carta and the Petition of Right.  Dutch provinces adopted an “Act of Abjuration” in 1581 that amounted to a declaration of independence from Spain. I don’t believe that any of these is commemorated by a holiday.  Similarly, the French Revolution produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, yet the event that is celebrated in France to commemorate their revolution is the storming of the Bastille, not the adoption of their declaration.

The Declaration of Independence occupies the place it does in American history, indeed in world history, because it contains the clearest, most elegant, most incisive statement ever made in support of the proposition that all human beings are equal:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Another curiosity is that the first truth cited is self-evident but not obvious.  Select any human attribute; no two people are equally endowed in their share of it.  The countless talents and qualities that humans may possess or lack are unequally distributed.  We are unequal in strength, intelligence, patience, willingness to defer gratification, tolerance for risk, or any other quality that can be observed or measured.  Because every quality that is capable of being measured or assessed is also one in which individual humans will vary, it is impossible that the self-evident truth of human equality is meant to apply to those observable features of our lives.

It is a statement rather of our equal endowment of natural rights.  The unequal distribution of observable attributes does not tell us anything about who is authorized to govern and who is required to accept government by others.  No human possesses qualities that fit him or her to govern without consent.  As humans have interacted with the natural world over the course of millennia, we have come to govern many species through domestication.  We have learned that, for example, dogs, cattle, sheep, and horses are suited by their nature to be governed by humans.  Each of those species has distinct features that fit its members to domestication and control, to government, by humans.  There is no such feature that fits a human to be governed by another human except by consent.

It follows that slavery or any other system of tyranny is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  Jefferson attempted to write that point into the long middle section of the document, the bill of particulars demonstrating that the King of Great Britain was unfit to govern the people residing in what had been his colonies.  Here is the indictment on slavery in full (spelling and punctuation untouched):

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Joseph Ellis points out that the paragraph blames Britain for introducing slavery into the colonies and then accuses the King of threatening to end it.  He also notes that the text never hints that slave owners themselves bore responsibility for continuing the practice.  The newly independent states could not unite around a document that included this language. South Carolina and Georgia would not have it.  In order to preserve unity on declaring independence, Congress pulled the paragraph on slavery from the text they authorized for publication.  There were other edits as well.  Jefferson remained bitter to the end of his days about the mangling of his work by writers less gifted than he was.

They pulled the particular charge from the indictment, but they kept the statement of the self-evident truth of the equality of all individuals.  A Congress loaded with slaveholders excised detailed language indicting the practice of slavery but endorsed a self-evident truth that was inconsistent with the institution of slavery and would eventually lead to its demise.  Lincoln thought that the apparent tension in this position would resolve over time.  He saw the principle of equal natural rights of all persons as the “standard maxim of free society”. It is the ultimate goal and purpose of government, to be advanced and, we can hope, ultimately achieved in the fulness of time.  “They meant simply to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

In the early days of the American republic, the accepted wisdom was that the institution of slavery was inconsistent with the Declaration and would be removed as quickly as events would allow.  By the 1850s, supporters of the institution saw it as a “positive good” and intended it to become permanent.  They adopted two different strategies for dealing with the tension between their position on slavery and the text of the Declaration.  Some, for example Senator John Pettit (D – Indiana) claimed that the Declaration’s statement on human equality was a “self-evident lie”. Others, such as Stephen A. Douglas (D – Illinois) claimed that, while it was true, it was intended to apply only to the white British residents of North America at the time the Declaration was adopted and to their descendants.

This kind of unseemly wriggling on the part of its critics is a testament to the power of the ideas in the Declaration.  As Abraham Lincoln replied to Douglas, the Declaration means just what it says and applies to all human beings at all times.  It is a statement of moral purpose, not a summation of observations.  We don’t earn our way to equality, we don’t have to be a member of any group, class, or interest to qualify.  Each of us achieves equal status with every other individual by virtue of our standing as humans.  No further evidence could strengthen this conclusion, which is why the Declaration identifies this truth as self-evident.

And every other statement in the second paragraph of the Declaration follows logically from the first.  As equals, we each own our lives and the fruits of our labors.  It is impossible to enjoy these rights without the support of our neighbors, just as it is impossible for them to enjoy their rights without assistance from us.  If we are all equal, then I have no right to govern you without your consent and you have no right to govern me without mine.  Further, we can measure the health of any government by how well it preserves, protects, and defends the equal rights of the citizens whose consent it has received.  The governed reserve at all times the right to remake their government when the health of that government, the measure of the protection that it offers to the equal natural rights of all, falls below a level deemed acceptable by the governed.  If you grant that all humans are equal, you cannot deny the equally self-evident consequences.

The finest statement ever made in support of human equality was written by a man who owned slaves.  Patrick Henry, who could speechify himself into a fury, declaimed “Give me liberty, or give me death.”  Yet, he owned slaves at the moment he made that statement.  At least he recognized the hypocrisy of his position.  His defense was that he knew it was wrong, but he could not bring himself to live without the comforts that slavery (of others) provided him.  Not much of a defense.  The response of the typical Virginia aristocrat to this philosophical tension was to expunge the sin by freeing his slaves at his death.  Unlike many of his social class, Jefferson left his slaves as property to his descendants.  None of us can live up to our highest principles at every moment of every day our lives, so let us not judge harshly.  And history is exacting some revenge on Mr. Jefferson’s reputation.  If you tour Monticello, you will find that the docents adopt an extraordinarily harsh treatment of Jefferson’s views on slavery, holding that even his opposition to the slave trade was nothing more than a self-serving attempt to keep prices of slaves high by limiting supply.  (He attributed the same motive to those in the Congress who insisted on the removal of the anti-slavery paragraph I quoted earlier.) I think they have gone overboard in their criticism, but he might have done more during his life to forestall it.

And now, in 2020, his ghost has more to worry about than criticism from frowning docents at Monticello.  The mob is coming for his statues, his memorial, and his likeness on Mount Rushmore.  It appears that their efforts have peaked short of success for now, but this won’t be the last time we hear from them.

The paradoxical facts of Jefferson’s biography don’t affect the validity of his statement.  The principles he enunciated with such clarity stand, as Lincoln noted, as a rebuke for all time to anyone who claims a right to govern others without their consent.

Which brings me to the last of the curiosities I’ll touch on this July 4.  In Washington, D.C., five great architectural monuments are laid out on two lines that intersect at right angles at the Washington Monument.  The National Mall runs west from the Capitol through the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.  Another line runs from the White House south through the Washington Monument and across the Tidal Basin to the fifth site, the Jefferson Memorial.  It was the last of the five to be built and was dedicated on April 13, 1943.  Jefferson’s birthdate was April 13, 1743.

At the time the memorial was planned, constructed, and dedicated, the federal government was as powerful as it had ever been to that time.  For the past 14 years, beginning with the Hoover administration and continuing through the New Deal, the government had been intervening in the American economy in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  When the nation entered World War II in 1941, the extraordinary powers thought necessary to win the war were added to those that had already been exercised.  The memorial was planned by officials who had proven to be remarkably comfortable in the exercise of power and confident in their ability to exercise it.

But the exercise of power without the consent of the governed is not legitimate.  If those who exercise power illegitimately do so out of good motives, that is preferable to those occasions, unfortunately far more numerous, when the motives are bad, but it is better still not to exercise power except with the consent of the governed.  And that consent can only be granted through the use of written documents, through precise constructions aimed at ensuring that when power is exercised, it is held within the constraints that the terms of consent have established.  The governing class of 1943 was not happy with these constraints.

They shortened Jefferson’s elegant statement, to remove the concept they found so inconvenient.  This is the portion of the famous paragraph that appears in the Jefferson Memorial, marked to show the words they deleted:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Did they leave those words out to save space?  Other statements from later parts of the Declaration appear below the quoted language. It wasn’t a question of space.  They removed the phrase on consent because they didn’t want to remind the public that it was there in the original.

It’s not a minor excision.  A government “instituted among Men” that takes the first part of the famous sentence seriously, one that believes and acts on the principle that all humans are equal in their natural rights, the right as Lincoln said to eat the bread that one’s own hands have earned, must necessarily believe that no one has a right to govern another person without the other’s consent.  That is the logical consequence of the self-evident truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights. That’s one reason, the most important reason, why slavery is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  But when a government ignores the terms of the compact under which its power was granted, it violates the purpose for which it was created.  To quote Ronald Reagan: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”

If you think you have the right to govern me without my consent, you don’t think we are equal.

As I have written before, one of the great ironies of the nation’s presentation of itself on the National Mall and the Tidal Basin is that the author of the clearest and most elegant statement ever written on human equality, a man who hated to have his work edited, suffered, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth and at the hands of the government he helped to found, the most egregious editorial treatment his work had received since the day Congress authorized its publication on July 4, 1776.

John C. Calhoun, the intellectual godfather of the Confederacy, has finally been de-platformed at Clemson University in his native South Carolina.  The university sits on land that was once Calhoun’s plantation.  An honor college had been named for him.  At the request of leading alumni, the college removed Calhoun’s name.

The removal of his name is fitting.  The anti-democratic, pro-slavery Mr. Calhoun was an active and influential political theorist.  He has been called the “Marx of the Master Class”.  He coined two constitutional principles, two sides of the same coin, that helped to give intellectual heft to the secessionist movement and to its philosophical descendants.  One of these is “nullification” – the idea that any state in the Union has the authority to prevent the enforcement within its borders of federal statutes that are antithetical to the state’s interests.  The second is the “concurrent majority” – the idea that a numerical majority cannot impose its will on a minority without their concurrence on issues of critical importance to the minority.[1]

In “The Conservative Mind from Burke to Elliot”, one of the most disappointing books I can recall reading, Russell Kirk counts Calhoun among the conservatives.  I think this is wildly inaccurate.  Surely a central element of the conservative mind is the acceptance of constitutional and statutory principles as laid down in publicly available texts, interpreted according to their original and plain meaning without deconstruction or addition.  Calhoun did not derive the principles of nullification and concurrent majority from the text of the Constitution.  He invented them.  You have to ignore the text of the Constitution, you have to read right past the Supremacy Clause, to come to his conclusions.

President Andrew Jackson took nullification apart in a presidential proclamation.  See. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jack01.asp.  Harry Jaffa finished the job in “A New Birth of Freedom”.  Calhoun’s ideas are nothing more than smoking ruins at this point.  (If you elect to read Jackson’s proclamation, please be warned that Jackson owned slaves and ordered the relocation of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears.)

And yet, Mr. Calhoun’s removal from a place of honor at Clemson is not without its ironies.  Many of the people demanding the removal of his name have far more in common with him than they may realize.

Modern, woke, social justice warriors hold the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in disdain as the work of white supremacists who wrote those documents for their own profit and not for the benefit of the American people as a whole.  In this Calhoun fully agrees.  He thought that only members of the white race were intended as beneficiaries of the liberties chartered by the Declaration and the Constitution.

Calhoun and his de-platformers agree that federal law cannot be enforced in a state that finds enforcement abhorrent.  For Calhoun, such a law was the tariff of 1828, the “Tariff of Abominations”.  For his modern acolytes, it is immigration law.  Sanctuary cities and sanctuary states gleam with the same light as Calhoun’s image of a league of nullifying states.  They both agree that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution can be ignored when circumstances require.

The de-platformers and Calhoun believe that rights derive from membership in a group, not from one’s status as an individual equal in natural rights to all other individuals.  For both of them, the groups to which individuals are assigned, and from whose membership rights are derived, stand in a hierarchy.  Calhoun recognized only two such groups, white and black.  The modern warriors deal with a larger number of groups and also have to account for the intersection of groups, because humans are complex and can identify with more than category.  Nevertheless, the modern warriors have developed sophisticated if unarticulated techniques for ranging groups into a hierarchy and assigning merit or the lack of it to each person according to that person’s group membership.  Calhoun is with them.

They disagree on how groups should be ranked.  Forgive me for seeing this as a trivial disagreement.  The real division is between those who think that humans derive their rights from group membership and those who think that all humans are individuals who have equal natural rights regardless of any accidental characteristic they may possess.

The demonstration that any group, race, social class, you name it, is superior or more deserving always fails.  It must fail because it is not based on reason, logic, or fact.  To maintain the idea, it is necessary to use force.  Dissent can’t be allowed because it might be persuasive.  The belief in group rights leads to a need for social control.  Calhoun’s south would not allow the distribution of abolitionist literature.  The same function is performed by the de-platformers through “speech codes”, bans on anything defined as “hate speech”, and the removal of those whose acts or words trigger an untoward emotional response in a member of a group that has achieved the requisite protected status.

As the proponents of group rights drift toward totalitarianism, they cannot allow dissent because their opinions are not based on reason.  International socialism of the Soviet or Chinese variety, national socialism of the German type, the many fascist movements that the world has witnessed, including the American version curiously called “antifascist” – what could be more antifascist than men in black shirts breaking windows? – not to mention the campus and street versions aimed at more informal control, are all based on the idea that one group is superior to another and that the purpose of government is to advance the interests of the more deserving group.

As it happens, these aberrant ideas, which have visited so much pain and destruction on humanity and continue to do so, derive from a string of 18^th and 19th-century German philosophers, including in their first rank George Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas inspired both Marx and Calhoun.  This observation led Leo Strauss to comment after the end of World War II:

[Germany] defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.

To which Harry Jaffa has added the pungent postscript:

If ever there was a nation annihilated politically on the battlefield that nonetheless imposed the yoke of its thought upon its conquerors, it was the Confederacy.

Mr. Calhoun may fade into well-deserved obscurity and may take many Confederates with him, along with their flag.  But his spirit remains alive in the minds of those who oppose him, without realizing that they are paying unintended tribute to the “Marx of the Master Class”.

[1] The two issues he had in mind, tariffs and slavery, are reflected in the justification for secession that South Carolina published in December 1860.  Calhoun had been in his grave for ten years when South Carolina acted on his ideas.  The concurrent majority doctrine is not applied evenly to all minorities.  (Surprise.)  Calhoun held that slaveholders, a distinct minority, can require that a numerical majority obtain their concurrence before the majority can act against the slaveholders’ interest.  At the same time, the slaves themselves, also a minority, had to abide by the decision of the numerical majority in the state where they resided.  Raw power explains the difference in treatment.  By 1860, slaves were themselves a numerical majority in South Carolina and Mississippi.  At some point, the weight of numbers would have overcome the demand from slaveholders for concurrence.

CNN caught Fox News in an error.  To illustrate events in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Fox had shown a photo of a man with a semi-automatic rifle standing in front of a fire.  The photo was misleading.  The fellow with the weapon had been on the scene at one time.  The fire had been active at another time.  The man with the rifle had not stood in front of the fire.

Fox apologized and took down the photo.  CNN got a chance to gloat.  The Seattle Times ran a story near the top of their website headlined “Fox News runs digitally altered images in coverage of Seattle’s protests, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”.

CNN takes seriously its responsibility to report on Fox News.  If only they and their companions in the media – the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC among others – put the same effort into scandals taking place in plain view.

Consider that we have learned that James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe and a list of other Obama administration officials testified under oath in secret Congressional hearings that they had not seen any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the course of the 2016 presidential election.  Yet, some of those same individuals spent years on air accusing Mr. Trump of heinous crimes.

Will these individuals be called to account for the difference between what they said under oath in private and what they said in public?   Surely the misdirection that their activities caused is no less important than Fox’s sin.  Fox’s treatment suggested that two events happened at the same time when they each happened at different times.  The media treatment of the “Russia-Trump Collusion” story told the public that events occurred when their sources knew that the events had not occurred at all.  Fox corrected their blunder and apologized.  Their media rivals have not done the same.

Imagine what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot.  President Trump and his senior advisors and cabinet officials have made countless public statements that the novel coronavirus originated in China.  Suppose that the national security advisor, secretary of state, attorney general, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI (assuming he could be found), and others had all testified under oath to Congressional committees that they had no information to support the China connection.

If their statements became public, think of the pounding they would take from the news media.  There would be questions about nothing else at news conferences and press briefings.  ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post would cover the story relentlessly.  And they would be right to do so.

The case of John Brennan, President Obama’s director of central intelligence, is especially telling.  On air at CNN, he accused Mr. Trump of treason.  When the Mueller report was released and Brennan’s claims were shown to be unsupported by any facts, he was asked, one time, how he got it so wrong.  His answer was that he was relying on bad information.

This from a man who ran the CIA for eight years.  He is supposed to be able to evaluate information, to separate the believable from the dross.

Was he asked a follow-up question?  Who were your sources?  Why did you believe them?

Now we know that there never was any evidence to support the accusations that Mr. Brennan made.  He must have figured that he could keep up the act as long as the sworn testimony of people like James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and Sally Yates remained classified.  Until now, Mr. Trump’s directors of national intelligence had been content to cooperate.  Richard Grenell, then the acting director, finally declassified this scandalous material.

Where are the tough questions from CNN?  Why did you charge Mr. Trump on-air with treason when your colleagues testified in private that there was no information tying Mr. Trump to Russia?  Why did you mislead CNN’s viewers for so long?

Adam Schiff told us on many occasions that he had incontrovertible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.  It turns out he had none.  Has anyone asked him what evidence he was relying on?  He now claims that the materials being declassified by the director of national intelligence are being released selectively.  Will the chair of the House Intelligence Committee demand the declassification of the materials he was relying on?  If not, will he be called to account for misleading the public?

As Holman Jenkins points out in the Wall Street Journal, the news media were used by anti-Trump politicians to peddle a narrative that has proved to be false.  But, he notes, the reporters and editors who are among the victims of the hoax, people whose professional reputations should be erased, don’t seem to be upset.

Remember Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog that didn’t bark in the night?  In “Silver Blaze” a valuable horse is stolen from its stable before a big race.  Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery by observing that the dog trained to guard the stable didn’t bark when the horse was taken.  The dog knew the thief and didn’t see him as an intruder.  He thought they were on the same side.

The dog had the excuse that its instinctive loyalty was misplaced.  It was not a willing accomplice to the crime.  The reporters and editors who want to bury the biggest political scandal of our time have the same canine loyalty but not the same excuse.  I count them as willing participants.

For much of our history, news outlets were aligned with political parties.  News media have been moving in that direction for some time and have now come home to their roots.  The only difference is that the reporters and editors of our day pretend to be objective.  The audience is catching on.

There is a fierce competition for the title of “second-worst decision of the United States Supreme Court”. The clear winner of the main event — “worst decision ever” – has to be the infamous Dred Scott case.  The opinion, delivered in March 1857 by Chief Justice Roger Taney just days after he administered the oath of office at the inauguration of James Buchanan, denied that Congress had the power to prohibit slavery in federal territories.

The facts of the case are laid out in crystalline detail by Don E. Fehrenbacher in “The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and History”.  To boil down scores of pages of text: When Dred Scott and his wife Harriet began their suit in 1846, they and their two daughters were held as slaves in St. Louis, Missouri by a woman named Eliza Irene Emerson, known familiarly as Irene.  She was the widow of a John Emerson, an army surgeon, who had acquired Dred Scott sometime in the early 1830s when Scott’s former owner, the Blow family of St. Louis, sold him.

Emerson served at Fort Armstrong in the State of Illinois and at Fort Snelling, now in Minnesota, but at the time in Wisconsin Territory.  Dred Scott was with him at both locations.  Slavery was unlawful in Illinois.  Fort Snelling was in the portion of Wisconsin Territory that had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, where slavery north of latitude 36º 30’ had been prohibited by the 1820 Missouri Compromise.

Dred met his future wife Harriet at Fort Snelling, where they were married.  They remained at Fort Snelling even after Dr. Emerson was transferred to Fort Jesup in Louisiana.  They later traveled to Louisiana to join Dr. Emerson.  Dr. Emerson met and married Irene Sanford at Fort Jesup.  The Emersons and the Scotts then returned to St. Louis.  From there, they traveled again to Fort Snelling, and then came back to St. Louis.  The second trip to Fort Snelling is significant because one of the Scotts’ daughters was born on that trip in territory where slavery was prohibited.[1]

After the entourage returned to St. Louis, Dr. Emerson was transferred to Florida.  He traveled there alone.  He served in Florida for more than two years, lost his commission, returned to St. Louis for the last time, fathered a child with Irene, and died shortly after their daughter Henrietta was born.  He left a life estate of all his property to his wife, the remainder to pass to their daughter on Irene’s death.[2]

In 1846, some three years after Dr. Emerson’s death, the Scotts began a suit in Missouri state court, claiming that their time in a federal territory where slavery was prohibited had worked their freedom.  Similar cases had come before Missouri courts in the past.  Enslaved petitioners had been freed in several cases similar to the Scotts’.  In fact, Fehrenbacher reports that prior to this case “there appears to have been no decision of a southern appellate court that denied a suit for freedom in a clear-cut case of permanent residence on free soil”.[3]  This time, the petitioners lost.  The Missouri Supreme Court openly acknowledged that its earlier decisions were no longer applicable because it did not wish to encourage the opposition to slavery that was growing outside Missouri.

Scott v. Emerson ended in 1852 with a victory for the slaveholder.  It appeared that the Scotts had two unpromising alternatives.  They might have dropped the case and tried to buy their freedom.  However, Mrs. Emerson (now Mrs. Chaffee, having remarried and moved to Massachusetts) had fought to keep the Scotts enslaved.  She could not be expected to cooperate.

Alternatively, they might have appealed to the United States Supreme Court claiming that the Missouri case had been incorrectly decided as a matter of federal law.  The Scotts’ lawyers advised against this approach because of a precedent that they thought would spell an automatic defeat for the Scotts’ cause.  Strader v. Graham was a suit for damages between a Kentucky slaveholder and a ferry operator.  The operator had taken slave musicians from Louisville, Kentucky to a job in Cincinnati, Ohio without the knowledge of Mr. Graham, the Kentucky slaveholder.  Once in Ohio, the musicians escaped and fled to Canada.  Their Kentucky owner sued the ferry operator for the financial loss that the escape had cost him.  The operator’s defense was that the musicians were not slaves because on previous occasions they had traveled to Ohio with the owner’s permission.  The operator argued that once they landed on free soil with the consent of the slaveholder, the enslaved musicians were free, even though they had returned to Kentucky.  At the time of the river crossing that launched the lawsuit, the enslaved musicians had not left Kentucky for two years.  The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld an award of damages to the slaveholder and the ferry operator appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction but stated in dictum that Kentucky law should govern the case.  The Strader case is easily distinguished from the Scotts’ case.  Strader was a suit for damages while the Scotts were suing for freedom.  On their previous voyages, the enslaved musicians in Strader had merely “sojourned” in Ohio, while the Scotts had been permanent residents in free territory.  The Strader dictum viewed the case as a question of choice of state law while the Scotts were claiming that federal law had been misapplied if not ignored.  Even so, the Scotts’ lawyers were convinced that the Supreme Court would rely on Strader to deny an appeal.[4]

Faced with these alternatives, the Scott team did something creative.  They began a new lawsuit in federal court naming John Sanford, Mrs. Emerson’s brother, as the defendant.  Mr. Sanford was a resident of New York.[5]

The step was creative but was also mysterious.  There is no record that Mr. Sanford owned the Scotts.  It has been argued that he was acting as a trustee or an executor of Dr. Emerson’s estate.  But Mrs. Emerson had a life estate in her first husband’s property; there was no trustee or executor.  To add to the mystery, two months after the Supreme Court decided against them, the Scott family was transferred to Tyler Blow, heir of the Blow family that had sold Dred Scott to Dr. Emerson in the early 1830s.  The transferors were Mr. and Mrs. Chaffee.  Mrs. Chaffee was, of course, the former Irene Emerson, the victor in Scott v. Emerson.  Mr. Chaffee was an abolitionist and a member of Congress from 1855 to 1859.

Despite the Scotts’ decision not to appeal the Missouri decision, the new case could be heard by a federal court because the Scotts invoked federal “diversity” jurisdiction, applicable to suits between citizens of different states, Missouri and New York in this case. Mr. Sanford signed a sworn statement that he was the owner of Dred and Harriet Scott.  The unusual facts hint that the parties contrived to manufacture a defendant in the person of Mr. Sanford, which has given rise to conspiracy theories, but no documentary evidence reveals either a pro-slavery plot that succeeded or an anti-slavery plot that failed.[6]

The Supreme Court held that the Scotts could not maintain their suits for freedom for lack of federal jurisdiction. The Court denied that the Scotts were citizens of Missouri.  Indeed, the Court stated that no person of African descent could be a citizen of a state in order to invoke the Court’s “diversity” jurisdiction.  Among the Chief Justice’s opinion’s many defects is the outrageous statement that persons of African descent are “beings of an inferior order” who might “justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery”.

When a political figure makes an unfortunate statement that he or she wants to take back, the first line of defense is often that the words were taken out of context.  Had Taney wished to walk back his outlandish statements – and there is no evidence that he ever did — the “out of context” ploy has some initial if superficial credibility.

Taney tells his readers that he was not stating his own view or the view of enlightened opinion in the year 1857.  Rather, he was invoking the attitude of the framers of the Constitution.  As a humble servant of the law, he was bound by the intent of the lawgiver.  He claimed that it was the Framers of the 1780s, rather than the faithful interpreters of their work in the 1850s, who established a government based on the racist principles[7] that Taney announced in his Dred Scott opinion.  In this he shares common ground with abolitionists who were his contemporaries and with progressives of our own time.

This kind of reasoning has given “original intent” a bad name.  Yet, Taney’s projection of his racial attitudes onto the American founding was not based in fact.  There was significant anti-slavery sentiment throughout the American colonies when they declared their independence, a sentiment that existed alongside a powerful pro-slavery interest.  Some delegates to the Second Continental Congress, the body that would adopt and publish the Declaration of Independence, received requests from constituents asking them to address the evils of slavery.  Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration included strong anti-slavery language that was removed to keep the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia onside.  At the same time, the anti-slavery principles of the Declaration’s second paragraph survived.  The Northwest Ordinance, adopted by the Confederation Congress, prohibited slavery in what was called the Northwest Territory (the future Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan).  Racial attitudes were less rigid, more tolerant in the 1770s and 1780s than in the 1850s, when explicitly racial theories began to take hold and some politicians began to see slavery as a “positive good”.[8]

In 1857, Taney cried crocodile tears and claimed that he had no choice but to follow the iron law that the Framers had laid down when they drew the Constitution.  Yet, not only is Taney’s reading of American history wrong; there is powerful evidence that he knew it was wrong.  As a younger man, Taney had argued the opposite position from the one he read into the Constitution and projected onto the American past in 1857.  Thanks to careful scholarship by Harry Jaffa, we have a clear record of statements by a younger Roger Taney that belie the position he adopted in 1857.

In 1818, an itinerant preacher named Jacob Gruber gave a sermon at a camp prayer meeting in Hagerstown, Maryland, Taney’s home state.  The audience included some 2,600 white and 400 black listeners.  Gruber preached the evils of slavery.  He was arrested on a charge of inciting public disorder.  Taney, then more than 40 years old, was Gruber’s defense counsel.

Taney’s closing statement has been preserved.  As Jaffa points out, if you didn’t know the date when the closing statement was made and you didn’t know the author, you might conclude that you were reading a note written by Abraham Lincoln.  The themes common to the time were all laid out.  Slavery was an evil practice, inconsistent with the charters of liberty on which the American republic was founded.  It was imposed on the colonies by the mother country.  As the colonies matured into states, they had found it difficult – indeed still found it difficult in 1818 – to rid themselves of this curse.

Here is an excerpt from Taney’s closing argument:

A hard necessity, indeed, compels us to endure the evil of slavery for a time.  It was imposed upon us by another nation, while we were yet in a state of colonial vassalage.  It cannot be easily or suddenly removed.  Yet while it continues it is a blot on our national character, and every real lover of freedom confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away; and earnestly looks for the means, by which this necessary object may best be attained.  And until it shall be accomplished: until the time shall come when we can point without a blush, to the language of the Declaration of Independence, every friend of humanity will seek to lighten the galling chain of slavery, and better, to the utmost of his power, the wretched condition of the slave.[9]

Was this Taney’s true thought, or merely the posturing of a lawyer advocating zealously for his client?  The excerpt has the feel of sincerity.  That impression is strengthened when you read the entire closing statement.  (That devil context again.)  The argument is stronger and covers more ground than was necessary to meet the charge laid against the Reverend Gruber.  The good Reverend had the right to speak his mind, whatever the content of his sermon.  Taney could have left it at that, rather than argue the truth of Gruber’s sermon, while invoking the natural law principles of the Declaration.

Apart from the tone and texture of Taney’s closing argument, two other facts argue for his sincerity.  First, he took the case voluntarily.  Second, after delivering his closing argument and achieving an acquittal for his client, he began to free the eight individuals who were his property under Maryland law.

As Jaffa notes, the 79-year-old Roger Taney who read out the opinion of the Court in March 1857 – he would turn 80 later that month — would have remembered what he said and did nearly forty years earlier.  He changed his mind about the evils of slavery during that period of nearly 40 years, but when he delivered the Court’s judgment, he knew that he was not the passive vessel into which the spirit and intent of the law fashioned by the Framers had flowed even against his will.

Nor was he content to revise history.  He projected his revisionist view onto the text of the Constitution itself when his opinion declared that “the right to own a slave is expressly and distinctly set out in the Constitution”.

Where?  The statement is a fabrication, as Abraham Lincoln noted almost as soon as the opinion was published.  Slaves – property that can be owned – are never mentioned by that name in the Constitution.  All references to them are to “Persons”.  Article I, Section 2 contains the notorious “three-fifths” provision, the mischaracterization of which has taken on demagogic proportions.  Direct taxation and representation in the House of Representatives were to be proportional to state populations, calculated by counting each free person and each person bound to service for a term of years as one person, each untaxed Indian as zero persons, and all “other persons” at the 3/5 rate.

The objective was to impose the burden of taxes and the benefit of representation in proportion to the economic weight that each state would swing.  Population was a stand-in for production.  However, it seemed reasonable to the Framers to debit the slave states for the reduction in productivity to be expected from persons who could not enjoy the fruits of their labor.  The Constitution recognized that in some states there was a variety of legal statuses into which a person might fall.  It apportioned representation and taxation taking that variation into account.  But the method of enumeration did not imply that the classification adopted by a state was correct and rightful, nor did it imply that the race of the “other persons” was a factor in the enumeration.  There were some 60,000 free persons of African ancestry in the United States at the time the Constitution was adopted.  Each of those 60,000 individuals was counted as a whole person for purposes of Article I, Section 2.  It was their legal status rather than their race that determined how they would be counted.  The Constitution recognized no other distinction among persons.  The “3/5 clause” recognizes facts on the ground but does not endorse the ownership of one person by another as a “right”.

As an aside, I don’t mean to suggest that the early American republic was free of racial feeling.  The First Congress enacted the Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited naturalization to “free, white persons” who had been resident in the United States for at least two years.  Racial feeling among white voters and their elected representatives was not as neutral as the language of the Constitution implied.  Apart from naturalization, questions arose frequently about the citizenship of free African Americans.  Yet, who can say whether the Constitutional Convention was more reflective of the attitudes of the wider public than was the First Congress or the politicians who later raised the question of citizenship?  The Constitution’s refusal to make racial distinctions is the more remarkable if the racial bias reflected by the 1790 Act was widely held.

Article I, Section 9 prevents Congress from prohibiting prior to 1808 the “Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit”.  Despite the indirect wording, we know who they are talking about. The reference is to persons, not property.  Incidentally, Congress prohibited the “importation of such Persons” as of January 1, 1808, the earliest date allowed by the provision.

Article IV, Section 2 provides that “[n]o Person held to Service or Labour in one State under the Laws thereof escaping into another shall . . . be discharged from such Service or Labour . . .”.  The person referred to is, of course, a fugitive slave.  As far as the Constitution is concerned, he or she is a person, with the same natural rights as any other person, but “held” to service “under” the laws of a state.  The “holding” is not “pursuant to” law, which would suggest a logical connection between the person’s status and the provisions of law, but rather “under” law, implying that it is power, not logic or reason, that causes a person to be treated in this way.

The carefully chosen language of this section – it was edited for just this purpose — contradicts Taney’s assertion that the right to own a slave is set out in the Constitution.  Rather, the document recognizes the fact that some states had granted to some individuals the power, not the right, to require others to provide labor against their will.  It is a fundamental error to conclude that the grant by a state of that power implies a right under the Constitution to exercise it.  It is an even greater error to claim that the right is set out distinctly in the Constitution.

The only time the document mentions “slavery” is when the institution was finally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.  But before then, the Constitution refused to say what Taney tried to make it say, that humans were or could be property.

But I give Taney credit for one thing.  His position was that a Constitutional principle must be drawn from provisions that are “expressly and distinctly” set out in the document.  He is not willing to deal in shadows or phantoms.  The major premise of his argument was that a principle must be expressly and distinctly set out in the Constitution in order to provide the motive force to reach a conclusion.  His argument failed because of its minor premise.  There is no provision in the text of the Constitution that says what he needed it to say in order to reach his conclusion.

Because the text did not accommodate him, he invented a Constitutional provision that supported his position.  Even so, his approach has more honesty, in service to a dishonest purpose, than those adopted by judges who came later.

Taney’s racism is so blatant and his gaps in logic are so glaring that they distract our attention from the equally serious if less visible sin that he committed.  Taney and the six justices who agreed with him engaged in lawless conduct.  He used his position as a judge to legislate.  He had no power, no authority to do so.  Yet, he has had many followers among the judges, although they do not acknowledge him.  For his followers, all of the many judges who have been and continue to be determined to manufacture a result, the principal defect of Taney’s method is that it is so easily refuted.  A judge who claims that a provision is expressly and distinctly set out in a document will, or should, lose credibility when that provision is found to be absent.

Taney’s followers have been more inventive.  They have found ways to ignore text that is inconvenient, to supplement it, and to discover shadows – penumbras and emanations, to borrow their phrasing – cast by explicit provisions to produce meanings previously hidden, which can be discovered by members of a priestly caste with lifetime appointments.

The ongoing development of those techniques opened the door to the brisk competition for the silver medal – second-worst court decision.  I’ll offer thoughts in a later post on how that competition shapes up on this observer’s scorecard.

 

 

[1] The Scotts also had two boys who died in infancy and another daughter, who survived.

[2] Irene lived to 1903.

[3] Kindle location 705.

[4] They were right.  At the end of his opinion in the Dred Scott case, the Chief Justice indicated in dictum that an appeal would have been an automatic loss for the petitioners because of the authority of the Strader case.

[5] The case is captioned Scott v. Sandford.  The superfluous “d” in Mr. Sanford’s name attached itself to the case through a clerical error and has remained there ever since.

[6] Mr. Chaffee is a likely suspect in an anti-slavery conspiracy that didn’t work out.  When the Supreme Court decision was announced, and a local reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts recognized that Chaffee was the brother-in-law of the respondent, Chaffee stated that he himself had not heard of the case until February 1857. His connection to the case embarrassed him.  He did not run for re-election.

[7] We live in a time when a charge of racism can be laid with a straight face against a non-Mexican who wears a sombrero to a Mexican themed party.  Because the charge of racism retains its force, it is too easy for those who would appropriate its power to apply the term broadly and loosely.  I would give the word to the sombrero crowd if there were a usable substitute.  There isn’t, so I will use it here, but with the understanding that it is intended in its true, original sense of “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group in inferior to the others”.

[8] I have noted before Abraham Lincoln’s observation that those who claimed slavery was a positive good did not want the good of it for themselves.

[9] Harry Jaffa, “A New Birth of Freedom”, p. 220.

Leap days keep the calendar aligned with astronomical observations.  The connection is doubly important when religious holidays are tied to the seasons.  Easter is a movable feast celebrated near the vernal equinox. Christmas is fixed at December 25, a date significant for its ancient relationship to the winter solstice.  The Roman calendar dated the winter solstice to December 25.  In pagan northern Europe, the date was noted as the first day after the winter solstice with measurably more daylight.

Without leap years, both holidays would drift.  It takes the earth a few hours more than 365 days to revolve from one vernal equinox to the next.  If we start a 365-day calendar by recording an equinox on March 21, we would find that after four years the vernal equinox would occur on March 22.  After a century, it would fall in mid-April.  A calendar of 365 days turns the page on a new year too soon to keep the vernal equinox to the desired date.

Easter is the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.  If the calendar is allowed to drift without leap days, the date of Easter would fall later and later in the year as the decades and centuries roll by and the calendar falls behind the equinox at the rate of about a quarter of a day per year.

If the calendar is allowed to drift, the date of the winter solstice would also fall later and later.  If December 21 is the date of the solstice in Year 1, it will fall about a day before the solstice in Year 4.  After a century, it will be more than three weeks earlier than the solstice.  A holiday like Christmas that is celebrated on a fixed date would gradually float backwards through the seasons over long periods of time.  It would return to the date that falls four days after the winter solstice after a tour of some 14 centuries. (365/0.25=1460.)

My personal view is that this arrangement would have lent more interest to these holidays.  There would be long periods of time when the two holidays occurred in the same month.  They might even fall on the same day in a given year.  After that, there would come a time when elders would fondly recall the days when, as children, they found Easter eggs hidden under the Christmas tree.

Long before Easter and Christmas became Christian holidays, other keepers of calendars felt the need to make adjustments to keep their holidays at the traditional and desired time of year.  Two lunar calendars – the Chinese calendar and the Jewish calendar – add a “leap month” every few years.  That allows the Chinese New Year to be calculated by counting new moons after the winter solstice, two for a common year and three for a leap year.  A leap month keeps the Jewish High Holy Days tied to the fall of the year and Passover tied to the spring.

The Islamic calendar starts a new month with the first sighting of a crescent moon after a new moon.  A year consists of twelve lunar cycles and is some 355 days long.  There is a Koranic prohibition against the use of leap months.  Consequently, the holy month of Ramadan falls some ten days earlier each year on a solar calendar.  (One wag asked “Is it my imagination or is Ramadan coming earlier each year?”)

During Ramadan, observant Muslims may not eat during daylight hours.  That rule has a consequence for physical laborers in higher latitudes during those periods when Ramadan falls in the summer months.  My gardener is a devout Muslim and was forced to cut back on his work schedule a few years ago when Ramadan was observed during high summer.  Apart from that, allowing the lunar calendar to drift relative to the solar calendar does not appear to have done Islam any harm.

The Romans imposed order on a solar calendar more than 2000 years ago.  Prior to the year 46 BC, the Roman practice was to add a variable number of days to the month of February every few years ad hoc as the need arose.  (Needless to say, the Romans did not refer to that year as 46 BC.)  Julius Caesar gathered the best astronomers of his day who advised him to reform the calendar systematically by adding one day to the calendar every four years.  The Julian calendar was born.

Unfortunately, the Julian calendar overdid the required correction.  If you add a day to the calendar every four years, you have made the average year 365.25 days long, or 365 days and six hours.  [(365 + 365 + 365 + 366)/4 = 365.25.]  A year – measured from one vernal equinox to the next – doesn’t take that long.  The earth arrives at a vernal equinox 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds (on the average) after the previous one.

The 365-day calendar turned its pages too quickly.  The 365.25-day calendar took too long.  The built-in error of eleven minutes and 15 seconds per year accumulated inexorably.  After a century, the Julian calendar had added some 18 hours more than was necessary.  The date of the vernal equinox began to move backward. In 1582, when Pope Gregory took the matter in hand, the vernal equinox occurred on March 11.

The solution was to reduce the number of leap years in a 400-year cycle by three.  Instead of adding 100 leap days over 400 years, the Gregorian calendar adds 97.  Years divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400.  1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was.  To get the vernal equinox back to the desired date, ten calendar days were skipped by fiat.  In places where the Pope’s word was authoritative, the day after October 4, 1582 was October 15, 1582.

Even so, the calendar will need an adjustment in the distant future.  The average year in the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425 days long.  [(365×303) + (366×97)]/400=365.2425.  However, the observed average length of the time it takes for the earth to complete the circuit from one vernal equinox to the next is 365.24219 days.  That tiny difference means that the Gregorian calendar adds about 27 unnecessary seconds per year.

It will take a bit more than 3000 years (counting from 1582) for those 27 seconds to amount to one full surplus day.  Our remote descendants may decide to skip a leap year to further improve the alignment of the calendar to the seasons.  The simplest proposal is to treat the year 4000 and future years divisible by 4000 as common years of 365 days.  Of course, the kids will do whatever they think best.  There is plenty of time to decide.