Das Boot
We often go walking on the North Norfolk coast, and this abandoned boat used to be a landmark on one of our favourite paths. It was fascinating and somehow graceful in its slow decay — and irresistible for a photographer.
Quote of the Day
”If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”
- Woody Allen
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Jackson C. Frank | The Blues Run The Game
Long Read of the Day
Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization
A short essay by Francis Fukuyama.
Insightful and topical, as usual.
Back in 2021, I wrote a blog post for American Purpose on “Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization.” In it I argued that when historians 50 or 100 years from now investigate how and why Western civilization collapsed, they would point to Silvio Berlusconi as the chief villain. The former Italian Prime Minister was the inventor of the modern form of oligarchy, in which a rich individual uses his money to buy his way into political office through the purchase of media properties, and then uses his political office to protect his business interests. The fact that Berlusconi used this strategy so successfully in the 1990s was why Italy was never able to engage in a reform of its institutions as it could have done following the collapse of its old political order after the Cold War. This pattern was then taken up by oligarchs all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, from Igor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine, to Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic (who may return to power this coming year). All of them used their business incomes to buy up declining legacy media companies, companies which in turn helped them protect their businesses. These oligarchs have threatened democracy in a very basic way, by exerting undue political influence and promoting corruption.
Well, guess what, we now have our own home-grown American oligarch in the Berlusconi mold: Elon Musk…
Read on.
Entre nous: I’m temperamentally suspicious of the ‘Western civilisation’ trope. Would that be the civilisation that launched two devastating world wars, by any chance? And colonised and looted half the world?
Screenshot
My favourite story in that context is about Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival in Tilbury Docks in 1931. Dressed as usual in a loincloth, he was greeted by a horde of Fleet Street’s finest — half-pissed hacks with ‘PRESS’ cards in their hatbands. The story goes that one of them said, “Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilisation?” To which the great man smiled benevolently and replied: “Ah, Western Civilisation; now that would be a good idea.”
Books, etc.
Carl Linnaeus’s Note-Taking Innovations
Jillian Hess runs an intriguing blog about notebooks, note-taking and history.If, like me, you’re an inveterate paper-notebook user (despite all the affordances of purely electronic ones) then it’s full of interesting stuff. Like this post on Carl Linnaeus’s record-keeping techniques. He found that he had to break loose from the format of the bound notebook because new discoveries required interleaving. He wouldn’t have been the first to come on that problem. Proust had it too, as I realised the other night when watching 102 Boulevard Haussmann, Alan Bennett’s masterly film about the great novelist.
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