Meanwhile, Just Outside Montevideo, A Frugal President

Jose Mujica, president of Uruguay, leads with no frills.

"If anyone could claim to be leading by example in an age of austerity, it is José Mujica, Uruguay's president, who has forsworn a state palace in favour of a farmhouse, donates the vast bulk of his salary to social projects, flies economy class and drives an old Volkswagen Beetle." The Guardian.

This is a man and a country we know little about. Maybe we should change that. Here is a beginning.

Beautiful Writing From Abroad - Almudena Grandes Hernandez

Here is a link to a beautiful and moving piece of writing in today's New York Times.

Here is the person who wrote it:

Almudena Grandes

{Madrid, 1960}

© Pep Avila

Almudena Grandes Hernández nació en Madrid en 1960 y estudió Geografía e Historia en la Universidad Complutense de esta ciudad.
Vinculada al mundo editorial como escritora de encargo, adquirió el reconocimiento del gran público con Las edades de Lulú, que recibió el XI premio de narrativa erótica La Sonrisa Vertical en 1989.
Su segunda novela es Te llamaré Viernes y su tercera fue Malena es un nombre de tango. La cuarta, Modelos de mujer, es una recopilación de siete cuentos publicados anteriormente en varias revista y periódicos.
En 1998 publicó Atlas de geografía humana.

I would like to read Almudena Grandes' article in the original language.

It is about dignity.

The Spanish used to know what poor people always understood - no one can steal your dignity; only you can abandon it yourself.

Observations By Tony Tharp

I thought I would post without comment a link to Tony Tharp's most recent comments about Oriental here.

Bear in mind he is writing from the wilds of Lake Okeechobee, not far south of the Okeefenokee Swamp, from the decks of S/V Yoknapatawpha II.

Seventy Years Ago: FDR Aboard USS Iowa Enroute Teheran

We last left the president sailing aboard USS Iowa on November 14th, 1943, on his way to Teheran. To bring readers up to date, here are the daily logs of the president's activities:

November 20th, 1943;
November 21st;
November 22nd;
November 23rd;
November 24th;
November 25th;
November 26th;
November 27th;
November 28th;
November 29th;
November 30th;
December 1st;
December 2d;
December 3rd;
December 4th;
December 5th;
December 6th;
December 7th;
December 8th;
December 9th;
December 10th;
December 11th;
December 12th;
December 13th;
December 14th;
December 15th;
December 16th;
December 17th.

My comments:
FDR's travel to Teheran and participation in tense conferences in Cairo and Teheran was far from a pleasure cruise. This was hard work, and would have challenged even much younger men in better physical condition. A little more than a year after completing the Teheran conference, once again FDR would make another transatlantic voyage through the war zone, this time to Malta and to the war-ravaged Crimea for another conference with Churchill and Stalin. FDR left Washington January 23rd, 1945 and returned February 28th. The following day, March 1st, the president addressed a joint session of Congress, reporting on the Yalta conference. He died six weeks later during a visit to Warm Springs, GA.

Does History Repeat Itself Or Just Rhyme?

Mark Twain is said to have observed that history doesn't repeat itself - but it does rhyme.

Many of us read history not only for entertainment, but also in hopes of learning useful lessons about our own time and place. We seek to uncover history's lessons.

Those purported lessons are brought to our attention by journalists, political figures and academics on major anniversaries of important events.

One such event is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on June 28, 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist in the town of Sarajevo. That was a shot not only heard round the world, but one that has reverberated now for an entire century.

Margaret MacMillan, professor of history at Oxford, University, has contributed an essay for the Brookings Institution examining the lessons of that event and the ensuing war.

I have read many of the diplomatic papers leading up to the war, tramped across the battlefields and pondered the issue of "war guilt" as it was called. After the 1918 armistice and collapse of the German government, the Western Allies insisted on assigning all of the guilt for the war on Germany.

I have concluded that no European power was without guilt. Nor was any power imbued with great resources of wisdom.

But the guilt at the outset plainly belongs to Serbia.

Professor MacMillan makes the case in her essay that the times in 1914 were much like our own.

We should read it as a cautionary tale.

But read it!

Education vs Training

"One trains for the known, but educates for the unknown...."

Thomas Ricks

Liberty

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

-- George Orwell

Seventy-Two Years Ago: Pearl Harbor And Japanese Politics

Today's New York Times prints an op-ed article by historian Eri Hotta addressing similarities and differences between today's Japan and that of seventy-two years ago. Her article is very much worth reading. I also look forward to reading her book: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy.

Japan in 1941 was not a military dictatorship or a totalitarian regime, and it never became one. Neither was it a democracy. It was, instead, a society built on strong networks of obligation, with decision making by consensus rather than by majority vote. The persistent belief that Japan in 1941 was a military dictatorship grows out of a deep misunderstanding of the way Japanese society worked. Ruth Benedict's wartime study of Japanese society, The Crysanthemum And The Sword, might have deepened our understanding, but it came out too late and has never informed our retrospective understanding of events leading to war. I look forward to reading Ms. Hotta's two books on the period.