Geography Quiz: Answers

To repeat:  One of these refers to a person; three to places.  Which refers to a person and by what name is he better known?  Extra credit if you can locate the other three.

1. The Banat of Temesvar
2. The Rann of Kutsch
3. The Epop of Emor
4. The Ziggurat of Ur.

A  Middle Eastern political leader claimed he was defrauded last year in a real estate deal with "a friend."  Which of these is the leader and which the land that is the subject of the dispute?

1. Wadi Abu Seif--(Land)
2. Wadi Jumblatt--(Leader)

Comment: "Epop of Emor" is "the Pope of Rome" spelled backwards.  It was a recognizable catch phrase in my college years; oddly, Google reported bo sightings (until now).

Go back to the quiz.

Hannah

We took a flutter last night on 's Hannah Arendt, remembering the kerfuffle over Arendt's New Yorker reportage on the trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann.   I think the best thing you could say about it is "inoffensive," maybe "workmanlike.".  Barbara Sukowa held your attention in the title role and Janet McTeer as Mary McCarthy was as annoying as McCarthy probably was in real life (that's a compliment).  But if you remember the Arendt/Eichmann episode, you wouldn't have learned anything new, and if you don't, the film probably won't inspire you to dig any deeper.

I do remember the episode and I remember feeling that Arendt had it pretty much right from the get-go.  As Arendt argues (I think), too often, evil is not outlandish, unworldly.  It's just stuff that people do--evil stuff, but still stuff.  FWIW,  you can say pretty much the same about good; cf. Marcel Ophul's pendant account of French resistance to the Nazis,  memorialized in The Sorrow and the Pity, where heroism is no more saintly than Eichmann's crimes are devilish. I suspect that Arendt came away winners in the long run (one reason the episode is forgettable); indeed I always thought that some of the outrage against her had a perfunctory air as if some of her critics found it politic to attack her even though they didn't have their heart in it.

But the movie did set me reflecting a bit on Arendt's career as a whole.  The book I take to be her iconic showpiece --The Origins of Totalitarianism--pops up on any number of lists of "great books" for the 20th Century. But does anybody read it any more?  Can anybody serve up a sufficient 50-word summary?  Or has it receded to the status of period piece, like Jack Paar or the Kaiser-Frazier auto brand?  Okay, grant that most, perhaps all, works of political/social theory begin as period pieces.  But some quintessential period pieces--Machiavelli might be the best example--have a way of transcending their period, to establish some lasting value.  Can the same be said for OT?

As to the rest of Arendt's work, there's a lot of it I can't evaluate because I haven't read it.  I do remember the character sketches or occasional pieces brought together in Men in Dark Times and I once again savor a curious truth: sometimes a writer's best work is his (her) more modest or less pretentious stuff: as a long-form journalist, she was actually quite good.

I also remember The Human Condition, not least as  orderly and systematic  in the way OT seemed to me not to be.  This may or may nor be a compliment--orderly Dickens is not Dickens at his best.  But her distinction between "work" and "action" (i;.e., "politics") does stick in the mind.   I do take some wry amusement for her Aristotelian contempt for mere "labor," the chores that you need to accomplish to get yourself through the day.  As a person who once cooked for a living, I am still a little startled to see her classify cookery as mere labor.    It cannot achieve dignity, she argues, it leaves nothing that endures.

Well.  Maybe last night's dinner is not something I wish to contemplate this morning.  But she seems utterly to have failed to grasp that while cooking may not endure, still cookery does.  The skill, the practice, the cuisine: no nation can call itself great if it lacks a great cuisine.  So if they invite for dinner at Hannah's--go for the conversation,  but stop for a burger on the way.

Who Is it? Rooney

Rooney Lee, son "Ol' Marse" Robert E. Lee; papa was, of course, the commander  of the Confederate Army and the iconic arch-saint in the mythology of the Old South.  The description comes from the iconic New Englander Henry Adams, as quoted in what may be the best book ever written about the Southern ethos: W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South at 102.    Adams and the young Lee were at Harvard together from 1854 to 1858.  Cash draws Adams' description from Adams' autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.   Ellipses re in Cash's quotation:

Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginia openness toward all he liked he [Lee] had also the Virginian habit of command. … For a year, at least … was the most popular and prominent man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else.  He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground
 … Strictly, the Southerner has no mind;  he  had temperament.  He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two.

Cash remarks that Lee and his Southern classmates "had behind them two hundred years of shaping in the pattern and [] are  to be taken, as Adams infers, as the typical flower of the Old South at its highest and best."  Cash sums up:

From first to last, and whether he was a Virginian or a nouveau, he did not (typically speaking) think; he felt and, discharging his feelings immediately, he developed no need or desire for  intellectual culture in its own right--none, at least, powerful enough to drive him past his taboos to its actual achievement. 

Go back to the original post.

Who is the COS?

The Chief of Staff is Denis Richard McDonough who came to the job earlier this year via the foreign policy apparatus and former Senator Tom Daschle.  He is said to be noteworthy for his loyalty, and for the fact that he once played football on a team called the Johnnies.   Back to main post.

Answer: Chinese Restaurants in Trier

How come there are so many Chinese restaurants in Trier, especially down by the railroad station?  Bob says it is because so many Chinese come to Trier to visit the birthplace of Karl Marx (commies, remember--a billion of them). 

I get partial credit because I knew it was Marx's birthplace.  But I had guessed it was so Marx's Jewish relatives had someplace to eat on Christmas.

My only reservation about Bob's answer is--do Chinese eat at Chinese restaurants?  Do Mexicans go to Taco Bell?  Do Swedes patronize the smorgy?

Back to the question.

First Nation to Abolish Slavery?

Vermont, by its founding constitution in 1777.   See link, cf.  link.

Wait a minute, nation?   Yes.  Apparently Vermont counted as an independent nation until it was folded into the United States in 1791.   

Return to Underbelly.

How Many Battleships in Acfive Service?

The answer is "none."  The last two--the Iowa and the Wisconsin--were striken from the Naval Register in 2006.  Link.  Their demise ended a long trajectory of development which perhaps began with the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, the first which actively involved aircraft carriers.  Return to the question.

And FWIW I just saw a tweet saying that the world's fifth largest navy belongs to Disneyland.