My diary-entry for August 29th 2013 consists of a cartoon of a
goblin wielding an incendiary device, and an invitation to "Come To The
Bombing Party"; a remake of my earlier cartoon from the time of the 2nd
Iraq war. It was the evening on which the UK and US governments were plotting
the means of playing with their military toys in Syria, arguing that a regime
that will use chemical and biological weapons against its own people deserved
to be bombed by others too.
Alongside the cartoon I wrote up two letters that are equally extraordinary in
their prescience and in their misanthropy, from Gustave Flaubert to George
Sand, the first probably written on June 29th 1870, though it may have been
July 6th or even 13th, a Wednesday anyway, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian
War:
“As for me, I am disheartened, distressed by the folly of my compatriots. The hopeless barbarism of humanity fills me with a black melancholy. That enthusiasm which has no intelligent motive makes me want to die, so as not to see it any longer…The good Frenchman wants to fight: (1) because he thinks he is provoked to it by Prussia; (2) because the natural condition of man is savagery; (3) because war in itself contains a mystic element which enraptures cowards… Have we returned to the wars of races? I fear so. The terrible butchery which is being prepared does not even have a pretext. It is the desire to fight for the sake of fighting…”
The second letter is dated August 3rd:
“Behold then, the NATURAL MAN. Make theories now! Boast the progress, the enlightenment and the good sense of the masses, and the gentleness of the French people! I assure you that anyone here who ventured to preach peace would get himself murdered. Whatever happens, we have been set back for a long time to come… Are the wars between races perhaps going to begin again? We shall see, before a century passes, several millions of men kill one another in one engagement. All the East against all Europe, the old world against the new! Why not? Great united works like the Suez Canal are, perhaps, under another form, outlines and preparations for these monstrous conflicts of which we have no idea.”
In the event, the UK government voted (narrowly: 285
against, 272 for, 91 absent) not to bomb Syria, and in the circumstances the US
government had no recourse but to follow suit - shame the British didn't have
the same say over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, North Korea, North Vietnam,
Kampuchia... see the amber pages, below
But still, it happened, and a rare enough event that it
merits commemoration and celebration here ...
1613
And speaking of incendiary incidents, June 29th 1613 was the day on which The Globe theatre burned down, bringing to an end the dramaturgical careers of two of England's finest playwrights, the Earl of Oxford and Sir Francis Bacon, though apparently the play that caused the fire, a somewhat fictionalised account of the life of King Henry VIII, was penned under the pseudonym of a Warwickshire Catholic usurer's son of homosexual repute and other forms of working-class depravity, including repeated pub-crawls with the ex-convict Ben Jonson, and a previous acquaintanceship with the executed Spanish spy Roderigo Lopes (whose house he was now living in), not to mention his association with other low-lives of the urban peasantry including some prostitute whose name gives away her background, Lucy Negro: the failed actor Bill Shaksper, or some-such forgettable illiteracy.
As to the why and how of it, a cannon was fired to announce the arrival of the actual King, only the thatched roof caught fire; the whole of Burbage and Shakespeare's huge investment was foreclosed within an hour. Was it a factor in Shakespeare's decision to return to Stratford? Or was he written out? Or was there no insurance, and he reduced to penury by the loss of his investment?
Impossible to ignore the evidence that he was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day, a populist entrepreneur who saw the way to make a buck, and pushed it to the limit; and not the romantic image of an artist of genius driven only by a desire to capture truth and portray beauty. Nor are the two by definition incompatible.
The Complete Works of Oxford and Bacon are listed below, though scholars have thus far been unable to determine whether they wrote as a pair, in the manner of Gilbert and Sullivan; or, if alone, which wrote which of the plays below.. and did they also write the poems?
Amber pages
Parliament prohibited tobacco growing in England, today in 1620. Why? Because of the risk that every food farmer would turn his fields into baccy, the way they did when the EEC offered huge subsidies for Oil Seed Rape? Or did they already suspect that baccy wasn't very good for ye? More likely, I am sorry to say, it was the slavery issue: move baccy farming to England, where the peasants were already effectively enslaved, as serfs and villeins and the poperty of their Magna Carta lordships, and then what would you do with all those Africans in the New World? I guess there was always cotton.
And today in 1966, the US first bombed Hanoi. Would it get me into trouble again with the authorities, if I created a blog named, shall we say, "The Book of US Bombings"? A history of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries based entirely on the bombs dropped, by plane or by drone, or the elections interfered with, the regimes overthrown or undemocratically installed, the secret CIA training for rebel groups, terrorist organisations (against enemy governments) and other proxies...
Start with the Madama Butterfly incident, the navy going in to force peaceful, Buddhist, isolationist Japan to open its doors to Walmart and MacDonalds; then Hiroshima and Nagasaki, North Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchia (the last US troops were withdrawn from what it still insisted on calling Cambodia, today in 1970), Guatemala, Granada, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria the most recent (see the update above)... did you know that Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama commander-in-chiefed bomb and drone campaigns in no less than eight countries during his Presidency? Or take a look at this link and give yourself a bomb-sized shock.
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