December 23, 2004
Cliopatrimony
A few weeks ago, I got a very flattering plug and a bunch of new traffic from Cliopatria, a group blog of historians hosted by the History News Network. Now I can announce that they have very kindly invited me to join them in blogging there. I'm pleased and flattered to come on board, as I've been reading and admiring both Cliopatria and the individual blogs of many of its members for some time. I hope I will find things to talk about at Cliopatria. As a young and not yet securely-employed historian, I'm reluctant to charge into fierce name-naming debates about the historical profession, but my thoughts on history in the abstract may find a home on that blog as well as this one. For instance, right now I'm trying to decide if the post I just made about Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter versus Canada is too snarky and petulant for Cliopatria's wider audience. Peanut gallery?
Blame Canada
I just got back from Upper Canada, where it was -30° C in the daytime, and the following bit of video from the time of George Bush’s Ottawa visit was making the rounds. It’s Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson taking a few cheap shots at Canadians while some gormless backbencher clucks feebly in the Dominion’s defense. I must warn you, the clip does neither country any credit. And it’s not nearly as satisfying as the justly famous video of Jon Stewart schooling Tucker on Crossfire. But you can go watch it now, in Quicktime or Windows Media. I’ll wait.
Are you back? OK. Yes. I know. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Ann and Tucker don’t really surprise or dismay me here. Dog sledding cracks, “we could roll over and crush you,” “you need us more than we need you”—yes, yes, the United States is big, Canada is small, it’s cold, quite a formidable argument you have there. If somebody (let’s say, hypothetically, a conservative American TV pundit) has spent absolutely no time in their life thinking about Canada, the first time they do have any reason to do so, these are exactly the things they will think of. And because they have never had these thoughts before, every little thing that pops into their mind will strike them as deliciously novel and clever. I’m only surprised Tucker didn’t manage to say “oot and aboot,” and Ann didn’t ask why the NHL doesn’t have a bunch of really fat hockey goalies.
Tangent: You see, the very first time anybody watches a hockey game, the same thought always occurs to them: Why don’t hockey teams get somebody really fat to be the goalie? Wouldn’t that make it much easier to block the puck? Now, after two to three minutes of rational thought, most primates will see that a hockey net is six feet wide by four feet high, so unless you’re strapping skates and pads on Jabba the Hutt, you’re not going to block any goals by girth alone. The result of this universal thought process is that if somebody ever does suggest fat goalies to you, you will know that the very concept of hockey only entered their mind in the last 180 seconds or so.
Anyway. Ann and Tucker don’t bother me in this footage any more than they usually do. What does anguish me is the utterly feeble response from Canada’s designated defenders. Alan Colmes does his ineffectual “I’m not really a liberal but I play one on FOX” bit, and Ann just rolls right over him, not unlike the hypothetical invasion of Canada that has her licking her lips. I kind of like the other guy in the first clip, Newsday’s Ellis Henican, who just bounces up and down saying “oooooh!” to everything, like he’s egging on a fight in the junior high lunchroom. But Carolyn Parrish going toe to toe with Tucker Carlson on the Wolf Blitzer show? Oy, Canada. I weep for my country.
Parrish is the Canadian Member of Parliament for Mississauga, Ontario, and she was recently ejected from the Liberal Party for her outbursts against both George Bush and Prime Minister Paul Martin. She’s on CNN because, ostensibly, she’s a leading Canadian critic of American foreign policy. She made cracks about a “coalition of idiots,” stomped on a George Bush action figure on the news-comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and told the rest of her party to “go to hell.” So why is it that when faced with an honest-to-goodness red-blooded red-state right-wing American, this firebrand of the Canadian left (/sarcasm) is absolutely flummoxed? Has she truly never had the “what do Americans think about Canada” conversation? Has she never met a living American citizen? Tucker Carlson is making the same kind of juvenile but harmless jokes that probably two-thirds of Americans (on the left or the right) think of the first time they encounter a Canadian. Yet Carolyn is totally blindsided. “Oh, oh, Tucker. I can’t believe you just said that. Oh, my. Oh, dear. Oh, heavens.” She should have worn a monocle in one eye so that it could have popped out in aristocratic astonishment. (Obligatory Simpsons ref: “That’s my third monocle this week! I simply must stop being so horrified!”)
Just to recap: the source of Carolyn’s beef with the Bush administration is this war they are fighting in Iraq. Thirteen hundred Americans and at least ten times that many Iraqis are dead. Yet with Wolf Blitzer’s help, Carolyn and Tucker spend more than half that segment discussing the proportion of Canadians likely to be dog sledding. This, apparently, is the pressing issue of the day. (Admittedly, I didn’t see the original broadcast, so I don’t know how that clip has been edited. But nothing in it inspires much confidence that they went on to have an intelligent debate of the war that somehow got edited out.)
Finally, and worst of all, here is Carolyn’s zinger. Here is her big money punchline, her comeback on behalf of all Canadians to this smarmy neocon punk:
“There’s a lot of dog walking, my friend. Not a lot of dog sledding.”
(Long silence. A lonesome cricket chirps. Or maybe for Canadian content, the mournful call of a distant loon.)
“There’s a lot of dog walking, my friend. Not a lot of dog sledding.”
Oh, Carolyn, Carolyn, Carolyn. That line might have earned one grudging chuckle on Front Page Challenge in 1963, but it is not going to stop the 21st Century enfants terrible of neoconservatism in their tracks. I hang my toqued head in shame.
Why does this bother me so much? I think it’s because the Canadians I know are clever, and quick-witted, and media-savvy. At least, that’s how I like to see them. They—and when I say “they,” I mean “we”—aren’t just weaned on American TV, they’re steeped in it. That’s something I really like about Canadians. Call us socialists, if you want. We like that. Make jokes aboot our accents, or donuts, or the cold. Am I going to deny it? It was 30 freaking degrees below zero on Monday! But make us look like we don’t know how television works? Like we don’t know from American media and pop culture? That hurts. That really hurts. We can’t all be Jon Stewart, but I like to think there are a few Canadians who could make mincemeat out of Tucker Carlson in a debate, or at the very least hold their own.
What should Carolyn have said? What would I have said in her place? I’m not sure. Keep in mind I am a bit of an anomaly as a left-leaning Canadian who also happens to truly love the U.S.A. But I might have tossed out something like, “TUCKER. YOU ARE A SHILL FOR A MONSTROUS AND UNWINNABLE WAR.” And then, you know, just see where that took the conversation.
I would not have engaged the dog sledding question. I would not have tried to win the “you need us more than we need you” debate. I might have said, “Of course we need you. Of course Canada needs the United States more than the United States needs Canada. Canada needs the United States to be part the world community and not a war-making pariah. Canada needs it not to mortgage our futures by sinking the economy that feeds us too. Canada needs it not to flee from the terrors of liberty into becoming a paranoid police state.” I might have said, “We know you got hurt. We know you didn’t deserve it, and we know you didn’t see it coming. And we know you’re lashing out now, and flailing around, and hurting yourself and the other people who love you. We’re telling you this because we are your friends, and we know you better than anybody else, and that is what friends do.” I might have said, “We know you’re scared, but we need you to be brave now, brave enough to see that this war is not doing you or anybody else any good any more. We need you to live up to all the things we’ve always loved about you. We need you to be adults.”
I have no illusions that any of that would have worked on Tucker or Ann. But at least I could watch it on television without wanting to emigrate to Mexico.
December 15, 2004
Let's Get Physical
With this post, I’m opening up comments on Old is the New New. I think I have MT-Blacklist installed properly, so hopefully we wonât have many problems with comment spammers. Our readership is, I imagine, small but highly discriminating. So whether you’re an online casino operator, a Nigerian diplomat with a delicate financial proposition, or a gaggle of barely-legal shemale hotties looking to party, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the history of the telephone and the future of networked communication.
I said in my previous throat-clearing post that I’ve been thinking lately about what lessons the early history of the telephone might offer for similar technological issues in our own time. I’m still circling around the topic gingerly, because there’s a lot to digest, and thereâs a lot to learn. I’m going to start with small, and perhaps obvious, observations. But here is the first in a series of notions, just one thing to keep in mind when thinking about the internet and technological change:
The network is a physical thing.
You see, there’s this tendency in writing and thinking about something like the internet, or the telephone before it, to forget or deny that physicality. It’s easy to get excited by the idea of an “invisible” network, of “transparency,” of “virtual” spaces and networks that seem to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. But the network isn’t everywhere, and it isn’t nowhere. It’s where the wires are. And its history and its significance looks different when you reckon with that as a physical fact.
Consider the telephone pole. The telephone network certainly seems today to be ubiquitous and unseen. Underground cables and satellite links render large parts of the telephone network literally invisible. The rest of the network escapes our notice due to its familiarity and reliability. Which of the streets you passed on the way to work today had telephone poles and which did not? I doubt that I could say with any certainty, and I spend more time thinking about telephone poles than anyone really ought to.
One hundred years ago, telephone poles and wires were neither reliable nor familiar. And the corporeal fact of the telephone network was much harder, both physically and politically, to ignore. Before about 1900, the majority of telephone lines ran above ground, and every private phone required its own separate wire. That’s a lot of lines! In large cities like New York and Chicago, telephone poles stood up to ninety feet high, and blackened the sky with thousands and thousands of wires.
Emotions on the seemingly prosaic subject of poles and wires ran very hot. Vigilantes tore down telephone poles by night; telephone company workers snuck out to erect them under cover of darkness. Farmers feared telephone and telegraph wires were altering the weather. During a smallpox epidemic in Montreal in 1885, rumors spread that the disease was transmitted over telephone lines, and an angry mob attacked the telephone exchange and tore down its lines. The Montreal Star was only partly joking when it testified against telephone poles in the early 1880s:
Boys can’t fly kites for these wires; good-natured gentleman slightly at sea can’t steer their way home through the poles in early morning. Housewives can’t see what’s going on in the streets from their windows; tobogganing is fatal; policemen can’t catch thieves; runaway horses smash their vehicles; and the poles don’t understand the damage they are doing, and therefore it is useless to berate them as we do our equally wooden City Council.
These sorts of anecdotes aside, the physicality of telephone poles and wires was important because they were the principal site of conflict and negotiation between telephone companies and local governments. Municipal governments in the 1880s and 1890s were limited in the ways they could control an outside company like Bell Telephone. They couldn’t set telephone prices and they couldn’t overturn Bell’s patent monopoly. Instead, they seized what powers they did have—sovereignty over streets and sidewalks and skies—and leveraged them for whatever advantages they could exact. In the Midwestern United States, municipal governments proved very successful in asserting authority over poles and wires; in Central Canada, they were remarkably unsuccessful. This split had a lasting impact on the development of the industry and the network in each locale.
Anyway, that’s just one example of what I’m talking about. The over-used trope of an invisible, intangible communication network tends to conceal the massive effort and labor that goes into building it and operating it. (The network—whether it’s the telephone, the internet, what have you—may seem transparent when it’s working perfectly, but it becomes maddeningly opaque the instant something breaks down.) It hides the physical constraints and bottlenecks that shape its growth. It denies the possible effects of the network on the people that don’t use it. It obscures the choices made and the paths not taken, all the accommodations and compromises built into the network, and the momentum generated by those very choices.
So the question for the class today is: are there physical aspects of the internet, or the modern telecommunications universe, that talk of “cyberspace” and an “invisible empire” and a “wireless web” ignore? Are there technical bottlenecks in the system that give some interests leverage over others? Do the messy realities of meatspace provide any access points for actors that we might otherwise dismiss as irrelevant to the allegedly ubiquitous, intangible, global net?
One that comes to mind is the “last mile” of broadband internet access, and what seems to be the coming fight between telephone companies, cable companies, power companies, what have you, for control of those lines. But I would be surprised if there weren’t others.
Tangent #1: I searched the New York Times archives for every mention of the term “telephone pole” in the NYT from the 1870s through the 1920s. (Yes, it’s true, I am a wild party. And speaking of history and technology, how cool is it that I can do that search with just the click of a mouse? Oh, and an expensive online subscription paid for by my alma mater.) Anyway, there were a few hundred hits, which divided quite neatly into three categories:
1. Political battles between municipal governments and telephone companies. (This is what I was looking for.)
2. Cars and/or carriages crashing into telephone poles. Lots of fatalities.
3. Lynchings.
That last category was chilling in its regularity. Something about using the telephone pole as a gallows—so modern and urban—makes the lynchings of the era seem rather less distant than the kind of creepy gnarled trees I typically picture when I think about lynching or hear Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit.”
Tangent #2: Au contraire, mon frere, I hear you say. All that jazz about the physicality of the network might have been true in bygone days of land lines and Model T Fords, but today’s future is wireless! No physical fetters, no wire trusts, no bosses but level bosses. Set your laptop free! Well, possibly. I have to learn more about both the politics and the technology of wireless today. But I do remember that “wireless” was also a magic word in the 1900s and 1910s, and I know the tale of how the coming of commercial radio in the 1920s required the wild frontier of wireless amateurs be brought to heel.
Of course, wireless transmissions are physical too. Indeed, because the electromagnetic spectrum is a finite space, constraints on its use are in some ways more real and permanent than bottlenecks in the wired world. We can usually build more wires, but we haven’t, as far as I know, found any way to build extra rooms onto the electromagnetic spectrum.
I sometimes think about the radio waves passing through us as we’re walking down the street. We don’t hear or see a thing, but braying drive-time DJs and cell phone conversations and Boston’s Only Classic Rock are hurtling through our vital organs at the speed of light. They’re harmless, I suppose, but that’s not my point. If we contemplated the fact that they are all around us, that our air is their medium, might we ask more questions about to whom the spectrum ultimately belongs?
December 10, 2004
No Comment
It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us—the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved ⦠the hated, the civilized, the savage ⦠may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss—except the inventor of the telephone.
—Mark Twain, 1878
That quotation doesnât really relate to what Iâm about to talk about, but it does amuse me. Twain (or Samuel Clemens—I never know whether itâs more correct to refer to an author by his name or better known pseudonym) was actually a big techie, an early adopter if you like. The fact that he even had a telephone in 1878 is pretty good proof of that. But new technologies could be irritating in 1878 in exactly the same way they can be irritating today. Hence Twainâs grumpy Christmas message. I believe Alexander Graham Bell actually wrote to him in mock protest after that was published, and Twain issued a sort of retraction, extending best wishes to Bell and instead ejecting the director of Twainâs local telephone company from his wished for heaven of peace and rest.
Anyway, Mark Twain also said, âHistory doesnât repeat itself, but it rhymes.â And that does relate to what Iâm about to talk about. You see, I wrote this dissertation, which Iâm now turning into a book, about the political and cultural history of the telephone from the 1870s through the 1920s. And for some time now, Iâve been saying in talks and papers and grant proposals, âThis story offers many lessons for our own era of rapid technological change.â And itâs true. There are many, many similarities between the struggles over telephony a century ago—who would control the telephone, how it would be regulated, what it was for, and what it meant—and debates over the internet, wireless, and other communication technologies today. In many ways, the world of telecommunications in the year 2004 looks more like the world of telecommunications in the year 1904 than it did for most of the twentieth century.
(Memo to myself: one of the big breakpoints in early telephone history comes in 1907. So if I want to keep using that â200x looks a lot like 190xâ construction, I really should get the book out by 2007. Which was my plan anyway.)
The real genesis of my project came about five years ago when I discovered several shelves of turn-of-the-century telephone industry journals in the stacks of Cabot Library, with names like Telephony and Sound Waves and American Telephone Journal. This was in the late 1990s, and I immediately recognized in those journals exactly the same breathless enthusiasm for technology, the same heady mix of utopian weâre-gonna-save-the-world idealism and weâre-gonna-get-filthy-stinking-rich hucksterism that filled the pages of Wired and Fast Company and all the other chroniclers/enablers of the dot-com gold rush.
(Tangent: like more and more library collections, all those journals are now in an offsite depository, where they can be recalled individually, but they canât just be discovered by meandering bookworms like myself. Good for the preservation of the journals, bad for serendipitous discovery. The problem of preservation versus access in libraries and archives: itâs a doozy.)
The parallels between our own âinformation revolutionâ and the ârevolutionâ of a century ago informed my dissertation, but they werenât at the center of that work. I was writing a work of history, and it was important to me that I approach that history on its own terms. Itâs foolish to pretend that history is not written in the present for present-day purposes or inspired by present-day concerns. But professional historians are rightly wary of overt âpresentismâ and anachronism, and predicting the future is right out.
That doesnât mean I wouldnât toss out the line in an article or a talk about how this story offers âlessons for our own time.â But in an audience of historians, I could be pretty confident that whenever I did, everyone would just nod sagely and nobody would ask me to follow up. I donât really blame them. Do you remember the late 1990s? Most reasonable people were probably grateful for some brief moment in their life when they didnât have to engage in discussion about the internet and the new economy and Y2K and what it all meant. So I kept my focus on what the telephone story of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century told us about the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—quite a lot, in my opinion—and I generally left it to my readers and listeners to draw conclusions for our own times.
This year, since my graduation, has been a bit of a culture shock. At the AAAS where I work, at the Harvard Business School where I have some contacts, and out in the world, Iâm talking to a lot more people from a wider range of disciplines, including some very smart people who are actively involved in studying, and in some cases making, the modern internet and telecom worlds. When I say to them, âThe early history of the telephone offers lessons for our own time,â they ask, âWhat are those lessons?â Which, to anyone but a historian, is a pretty reasonable question. I have to stop letting it catch me off guard.
A nice moment from Seinfeld: New Yorker editor (failing to explain a cartoon): âIt's a commentary on contemporary mores.â Elaine: âBut what is the comment?â
So one of my many projects this year has been bringing myself up to speed on modern developments in telecommunication—âmodernâ meaning after 1926 or so—and thinking in a more rigorous way about what lessons or patterns we can see in the past that are really worth remembering in the future. I do this with some trepidation. One thing I saw again and again in my research was how people trying to understand the telephone one hundred years ago looked to earlier technologies like the telegraph and the railroad. In my opinion, those precedents narrowed possibilities and obscured original thinking at least as often as they suggested useful strategies or ideas.
But I think the general shape of the story does offer several useful lessons. Not predictions. The whole point of my work on the telephone is that nothing was inevitable. There were choices made, and not made, at each and every step of the telephoneâs spread. At the start of the twenty-first century, as at the start of the twentieth, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to make choices about technology. These choices demand debate and discussion over issues like competition, monopoly, regulation, community, nationalism, globalization, etc., etc.—all issues that bedeviled our ancestors one hundred years ago.
Youâll notice I still havenât actually gotten to what the lessons are. Donât worry. Iâm getting there! âTo be continued,â as Jim Carroll says at the close of every discussion. One prediction I am confident in making: there is more on this subject to come.
December 02, 2004
It's Mostly About The Benjamins
“Who do you root for in the French Revolution?”
Lisa and I were in Paris this summer, a trip my other website chronicled at some length. One morning we toured the Conciergerie, the prison where those condemned by the Revolution spent their final days. Considering all it commemorates—tyranny! revolution! heroism! terror! heads, and the cutting off thereof!—the Conciergerie is surprisingly dull. There are two ways for a museum to be interesting, I think. One is to offer genuine historical analysis: to put things in context, to make real connections between history and the objects on display, to teach visitors something new. The other is to pander to what visitors already think they know: cheering the heroes and hissing the villains, and maybe tossing in a nice laser light show or some gory wax mannequins. But the Conciergerie steadfastly refuses to do either. The stone cells where Marie-Antoinette, and later Robespierre, waited for the guillotine are just empty rooms now. Shuffling through them with a hundred other tourists does not evoke La Terreur so much as L’Ennui.
So in an attempt to liven up the proceedings, I asked Lisa, “Who do you root for in the French Revolution?” The Conciergerie offers no hints as to whether its curators’ sympathies lie with doomed aristocrats, brilliant philosophes, ruthless dictators, downtrodden peasants, or angry bourgeoisie. Dividing the past into good guys and bad guys almost never makes for good history, but it does pass the time. Lisa thought about it a bit and said, “Benjamin Franklin.”
Technically, our judges cannot accept that answer. Franklin was in France from 1776 to 1785, returning to Philadelphia four years before the French Revolution began. But it’s a good answer for a patriotic American like Lisa, and honestly, who doesn’t root for Ben Franklin? Statesman, publisher, scientist, inventor, playa, wizard, proud flatulator, and sage—Ben Franklin was cool.
Franklin is, as they say, so hot right now, with big new biographies out by Edmund Morgan, Gordon Wood, and Walter Isaacson. Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton have all had their moments in the sun, so we inevitably cycle back to Franklin. (Sorry, Elbridge Gerry. Maybe next time.) On the way to work today I heard an ad for a Ben Franklin biography on the History Channel or A&E with the slogan, I kid you not, “Ben Franklin⦠Catch the lightning!”
The French, certainly, loved Franklin. With his fur hat and his Poor Richard homilies, he was everything they imagined America to be. Or at least he knew how to play the part. He also loved the cosmopolitan whirl of pre-Revolutionary France, and apparently made out like a bandit in the Paris salons. The beautiful Madame Helvétius (to whom Fontenelle, at age 100, was moved to say, “Ah, madame, if I were only eighty again!”) took a liking to Franklin and scolded him for not coming to see her. “Madame, I am waiting until the nights become longer,” he said. (Take my word for it, in the 18th century that was pretty risqué.)
One teaching job I recently applied for required a short essay with the application about how you would teach some historical text of your choosing. I wrote about Franklin’s Autobiography, which I love teaching. What you’re reading here is all the stuff I wanted to put in that little essay but didn’t.
The Autobiography (the full text is here) is a great text for talking about 18th century America. First, this is because Franklin is so funny and clever and seemingly approachable. America’s spokesman in life, he now makes a fine ambassador from the 18th century to the 21st. He seems modern and understandable to present-day students in a way that few of his contemporaries do.
Second, Franklin seems—note my choice of verb—quintessentially American. There’s the famous section where Franklin decides to make himself morally perfect, and draws up a chart of all the virtues he wants to possess. All it will take to achieve perfection, he figures, is checking them off day by day: Monday he achieves temperance, Tuesday is frugality, Wednesday industry, Thursday sincerity, Friday cleanliness… “As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other,” he says. Bookstore shelves today groan with self-help volumes that promise exactly the same sort of methodical moral improvement, though they are rarely written with Franklin’s light touch or wit. But in the end, Franklin decides with a wink that it is better to look good than to be good. “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of these virtues,” he writes, “but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.”
Third, the Autobiography reads like the original Horatio Alger story, the story of a penniless runaway who rose to dine with kings and help create a nation. (That reminds me: I heard some crazy stories about Horatio Alger the other day that I should probably share.) But finally, I love the Autobiography because it’s one big put on. That is, it’s not wholly untrue, but Franklin is incredibly slick, and the whole thing is very carefully crafted. Franklin knew the monsieurs and mademoiselles would go nuts for the aw-shucks Quaker in the big fur hat (he wasn’t really a Quaker, but he let everyone think he was) and he knows just what buttons to push in his autobiography too.
He actively and knowingly constructs an image for himself as “the first American,” and in so doing, he creates an image of America too. He writes his life story as if it took place in a secular, egalitarian society that didn’t actually exist at the time he was writing. He writes himself, in other words, into the still fictional country he is in the process of trying to make real. This ends up being an audacious act of self-creation, not only for Franklin, but for a whole vision of an America that had not yet come to be. In a sense, it’s social science fiction.
Grant Morrison called his 1990s comic book The Invisibles a magical hyper-sigil designed to make itself come true (nb: Grant Morrison says a lot of things). Whether or not that’s true of The Invisibles, it’s definitely true of Franklin’s Autobiography. Franklin’s story takes place in a non-feudal, non-aristocratic, largely non-religious America. It’s a fictional America that bears a passing resemblance to the real thing, but corresponds most remarkably to the ideal world imagined by the political philosophers of the Enlightenment. Yet it ultimately laid out a blueprint for what the United States would at least try to become.
The historian Robert Darnton has a lovely essay (and book) called George Washington’s False Teeth in which he argues that American historians and others have not always recognized the strangeness of the 18th century to our own time. “The taste for strangeness does not suit the favorite flavors of history in the United States,” he writes. We are inclined to see the Founding Fathers as prescient visionaries of all the United States would become, basically 18th-century Dear Abby’s that we can return to for advice on each new debate or crisis we encounter. Apprehending the Autobiography as a kind of speculative fiction restores some of that strangeness. It’s a reminder of how distant the 18th century is from the 21st, and how radical the ideas of the Enlightenment once were. It helps us to see the American Revolution and the French as unexpected and even unlikely events, and to think of democracy and individualism both in America and elsewhere as strange and often fragile constructions that have to be imagined into being, rather than as the inevitable unfolding of historical destinies. What seems most familiar to us in the Autobiography is often what is most fictional. Objects in Franklin’s world are more distant than they appear.
* *
On the day in Paris we went to the Conciergerie, Lisa and I also toured Notre Dame and the Ste. Chapelle. Notre Dame is bigger and grander, of course, but Ste. Chapelle may have more of a visceral impact. It’s an immense, vaulted space, largely empty, lined with huge, magnificent stained glass windows of unbelievable intricacy. In all the cathedrals we visited in France, I kept thinking about the amount of craft and effort put into details like the top panels of these stained glass windows, way up high where almost nobody but the original makers will ever appreciate or even see them. (Except their God, if you like.)
Ste. Chapelle is not really a cathedral. It’s actually a trophy case, built by Louis IX in the 1240s to house his collection of religious relics, which included, allegedly, Christ’s Crown of Thorns. Louis bought it from the Emperor of Constantinople in 1238 for some outlandish sum of money, and why would the Emperor of Constaninople lie about a thing like that? So now I have an image of Louis IX gloating over his poly-bagged religious collectibles like the comic store clerk on The Simpsons. “Ahem. Please do not touch the crown of thorns. It is priceless and fragile. You may look at this foam trucker cap from the 15th century instead. The inscription is in Latin. It says, âDamn Seagulls.’”
Anyway, Ste. Chapelle was damaged during the Revolution and the Crown of Thorns briefly disappeared. (It’s at Notre Dame now, but is only displayed on special occasions.) And as soon as I hear that, I can’t help it: a demented alt.historical action movie starts unspooling in my mind:
Benjamin Franklin is our hero, because you can’t have a demented action movie without an American hero, and the Crown of Thorns is the MacGuffin that everybody is after. (What’s a MacGuffin?) I like the idea of Franklin, rationalist and deist, having to capture this classic artifact of monarchism and papism. But actually, Franklin by 1789 was a bit long in the tooth to be an action hero. OK, Thomas Jefferson or the Marquis de Lafayette can be the hero, and Ben can be the old mentor. (Ben Obi-Wan Franklin, so to speak.) Now I’m seeing gravelly-voiced Kris Kristofferson in the role. He’s the leader of the Claves Lux (the Keys of Light), a secret society devoted to liberty and freedom from superstition, named for the keys they string onto kites in order to communicate across the Atlantic via phlogistonic lightning bolts.
There actually is a demented action movie out right now featuring Ben Franklin, sort of. It’s called National Treasure, but Ken Hite pegs it pretty accurately as The Ben Franklin Code. Ken is, as many people reading this already know, the king of freewheeling historical speculation of the sort I’m indulging in here. His own riff on Ben Franklin is great but, alas, available to paid subscribers of the gaming magazine Pyramid only. You can, however, go to Ken’s LiveJournal to read the real ending to National Treasure, suppressed by the Great Templar Conspiracy, and to chuckle at the following killer line:
If you, dear viewer, are planning any sort of operation, be it a quest to destroy a Ring of Power, the theft of a silvery briefcase, a 00 spy network, a quixotic treasure hunt, or whatever, just don’t hire Sean Bean. It won’t end well for you. Some day, they should make a movie that only has Sean Bean and Gene Hackman in it, and we could watch them betray each other recursively for 110 minutes.
Speaking of Sean Bean, my movie needs a villain. Well, I remember from Tom Standage’s fun little book on the subject that Ben Franklin, a chess master, was defeated by the Turk, the wooden chess-playing automaton that delighted and mystified Enlightenment Europe. The Turk was a hoax, of course, but not in my movie, he isn’t. Now the Turk is the mechanical mastermind behind the Illuminati, or the Rosicrucians, or something similarly beloved by conspiracy nuts, manipulating the crown princes of Europe like the pawns on his wooden chessboard. What diabolical scheme for the Crown of Thorns does this oaken Ottoman harbor in his clockwork heart???
So I’m trying to work the Babylonian Captivity and the Antipope into my movie too (we also went to Avignon on this trip), and I’ve just arrived in my head at the climactic scene where the Dark Pimpernel’s headless zombie Hessians combine to form⦠um, I dunno, a giant headless zombie Hessian, when Lisa says, “What are you thinking about?” And I realize we’ve walked through about five arrondissements. She often asks me that when I’m lost in some ridiculous reverie like this. I’m happy to share, and she’s good natured about listening, but man, where do you start? My Ben Franklin action movie, like the stained glass at Ste. Chapelle, shall remain a work of art appreciated only by its maker. (Except that the stained glass at Ste. Chapelle exists.)
So, who do you root for in the French Revolution?
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I almost forgot one more bit of recent Franklin ephemera: this story about a modern-day Franklin impersonator running into some true-blue patriots, courtesy of my friend Jess.
