December 1

Amber pages 


11:45

Woody Allen (Allen Stuart Konigsberg), comedian-filmmaker, born today in 1935

The airlift of Cuban refugees into Miami began today in 1965; thousands were already there of course, those who had fled from Battista, followed by followers of Battista fleeing from Castro, followed by former followers of the followers of Castro's former followers who followed them into exile, followed by...

The Second Crusade began, today in 1145; and somewhere in the world, every day, usually around 11.45 am, just before high noon anyway, the moment when the followers of thenext, the latest, the most absolute must Crusade begins its ... you can fill in the rest of that sad tale yourself, and then look again at Pessoa's comment on November 30, the one that will take your entire life.

Iceland became an independent state from Denmark, today in 1918. And why do I care? I don't really, any more than I cared about Luxembourg becoming independent of The Netherlands on November 23. And yet. A corner of my mind is reflecting on the 19th century as the Century of Nationalism, when it became the next "Great Crusade" for humanity, and everyone was bullied into believing in its "pro patria mori" scoundrelisms; and then its followers followed it into the trenches of the First World War, and mustard-gassed European civilisation into oblivion, High Noon at 11.11 rather than 11.45; after which there followed sixty years of Fascism across the continent (I include the variety followed by Stalin and his followers). Nationalism as yet one more failed ideology. And now, for the next Crusade, we are being asked to sign up for the United States of Europe. When will they ever learn? O when will they ever learn?

Never, if history is simply another dark satanic treadmill, and all we do is repeat the same homogenised model again and again ... Model T on this occasion. Today in 1913. The mill the very first "continuous moving assembly line" introduced by Henry Ford, "a car every two hours, 38 minutes"... I wonder if they switched the first one on at 9:07?

And then, today in 1955, some Crusading white man told Rosa Parks which way to follow him, which was to the back of the bus, behind superior whites, not in front of them, and... surely not... a "negro girl", a 15-year-old girl - no, no, that was Claudette Colvin, months before this incident, they put her in juvenile detention for doing it... but still, a "negro woman", a human being, a member of the passively complicitous race of victimhood collaborators... she did what?... impossible. Click here. Somebody should make a satirical movie about this sort of thing?

And while they're at it, they could fill in one of the strange blank spaces in the English History curriculum in the United Kingdom, a story that sits alongside Lady Jane Grey in the marginalia and footnotes section of the list of monarchs (see July 19). The first poem that I ever learned by rote, and it is still sitting there among the synapses, as pointless aqnd as inaccurate as it ever was:

                    Willie, Willie, Harry, Ste
                    Harry, Dick, John, Harry 3
                    1, 2, 3 Eds, Richard 2
                    Harry 4, 5, 6 - then who?
                    Edward 4, 5, Dick the Bad
                    Harry's twain and Ed the Lad
                    Mary*, Bess and James the Vain
                    Charlie, Charlie, James again
                    William and Mary, Anna Gloria
                    4 Georges, Willie and Victoria
                    Edward the Seventh next - and then
                    George the Fifth in 1910
                    Edward the Eight - but he retired
                    George the Sixth - but he expired

* The asterisk is where Lady Jane Grey belongs. But I am focused elsewhere, because Henry I died today, in 1135, and sparked the Matilda-Stephen civil war that ended with Henry II stealing the throne from the heiress apparent. You can read the full tale here.



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