Days Past, Lake Tanganyika, Flying Dogs and Frozen Peas: (5) Days of Dredging Up Nov. 3

"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." (James Baldwin, Notes of A Native Son, 1955)

Venturing out onto the shaky platform of experimentation, I am going to try and write about, "This Day in History," using as my guide the November 3rd entry from www.infoplease.com/dayinhistory. You will readily see that there are but (7) topics that Infoplease thought were appropriately significant. I am going to try and write a little something about each of them. My hope is I will not wander off into the bush. This approach to blogging is just a little laboratory work, and will probably not be here, and at once, perfected:

In 1839, the first Opium War between China and Britain broke out. In 1903, Panama proclaimed its independence from Colombia. In 1952, Clarence Birdseye marketed the first frozen peas. In 1957 [the year of my birth] the USSR sent the first animal, a dog named Laika, into space aboard the Sputnik II. Laika died in orbit. In 1986 a Lebanese magazine broke the story of U.S. arms sales to Iran, leading to the Iran-Contra affair. In 1992, Carol Moseley-Braun became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. In 2004 Hamid Karzai was declared the winner in Afghanistan's first presidential election.

Like John Donne, whose Meditation XVII is quoted (for those of us still in thrall to the critically disreputable Ernest Hemingway-- racist, sexist, anti-gay) at the start of for Whom The Bell Tolls, (1940), I feel connected in some wise to all these events:

No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee.

Seems to me, from the dusty folios of collegiate memory, that at the front of the Scribner's FWTBT, that I read, then, that this was rendered as verse. Vaguely, I seem to recall a rather fanciful line-drawing of a rugged man seated beneath a tree. He may have been smoking a cigarette. But this may be an addled memory of the scratchy illustrations in Kim, by that (still) other racist bastard, Kipling, who, while appealing to contemporary Political Correctness in immortalizing the Decline of the West in The Times of London, in Recessional, was still weltering in his racial superiority in Kim.

The title character, Kim, was the orphaned son of a of a native mother and a soldier in the Irish regiment. In the novel Kipling based the shadowy character Colonel Creighton on Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and his activities. Burton, the Devon son of an Irish officer in the British Army, was a star player of the Great Game, the only white man to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, premier translator of the Kama Sutra, scion of The Arabian Nights, portrayed in the movie Mountains of the Moon, (1990), by Irish actor Patrick Bergin. I find myself wondering if the title is from Poe, in Eldorado:

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied-
"If you seek for
Eldorado!"

Burton was among the first English translators, with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, of the Kama Sutra, and in 1888, he began his “new version,” of The Scented Garden, or as it is sometimes called, The Perfumed Garden. Burton’s wife, Lady Isabel Burton, said it “occupied him seriously only six actual months,” the last six months of his life.

According to Thomas Wright, in “The Life of Sir Richard Burton:”

“'The Scented Garden,' or to give its full title, 'The Scented Garden for the Soul’s Recreation,' was the work of a learned Arab Shaykh and physician named Nafzawi, who was born at Nafzawa, a white, palm-encinctured town which gleamed by the shore of the Sebkha—that is, salt marsh—Shot al Jarid; and spent most of his life in Tunis. The date of his birth is unrecorded, but 'The Scented Garden,' seems to have been written in 1431. Nafzawi, like Vatsyayana, from whose book he sometimes borrows, is credited with having been an intensely religious man, but his book abounds in erotic tales seasoned to such an extent as would have put to the blush even the not very sensitive… It abounds in medical learning, is avowedly an aphrodisiac, and was intended, if one may borrow an expression from Juvenal, 'to revive the fire in nuptial cinders.'”

Burton considered The Scented Garden his most mature and best book, not only for the skill of its translation, but the acuity of his interpretation, and beauty of language. It was intended to provide his surviving wife with a comfortable annuity generated through a treasure of royalties.

In Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Makkah, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West, by Edward Rice (Charles Scribner's Sons: New York 1990), I read that soon after Burton succumbed at age sixty-nine to a heart attack (“The ether! The ether!” he is said to have exclaimed, during his final crisis-- ether was considered a medical miracle and all-purpose pick-me-up), his wife, her Victorian sensibilities outraged (probably by the last chapter in The Scented Garden, which concerned pederasty), proudly fed the manuscript into the fire.

Although I am blackly guilty, here, of a bait-and-switch (Burton had nothing to do with the Opium Wars), I will ask some latitude. At the gala November 3 Opening Day of the first of the opium wars, he was barracked as an undergraduate at Oxford, the ways of which, according to The Athenaeum No. 3287, Oct. 25, 1890 (p. 547), “were little to his taste, and ultimately, in 1842, a commission in the East India Company's Service was procured for him. During his residence in India he was enabled to indulge in his love of travel, yet it was in 1852 that his 'Pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca' at once sealed his reputation as one of the most daring and successful explorers of the time. His next feat, in 1855, was a visit to Harar, a city already known to the early Portuguese, but never before visited by a European. If he failed on that occasion in penetrating through Somal Land (sic) into Equatorial Africa, he was all the more successful in his next venture, when, accompanied by Speke, he discovered Lake Tanganyika (February, 1858).”

The biography of this old hero crops up, now, not just because his lurid life still appeals to my love of historical romance (like the fictional Kim does, and as does Huck, for that matter, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, racism notwithstanding), but because I love a good yarn about boys and men in peril; and also because in his life I see curious parallels and contradictions to our own time, when our country is near extricating itself with some shred of credit from our own Arabic-Oriental-Muslim adventure.

As only an aside, I will make this suggestion, that the current drug war may offer some parallels to the Opium Wars, which were caused by Britain illegally exporting opium to China from British India in the 18th century to counter its trade deficit. But comparisons are labored, unless one believes in a Third World conspiracy of Bandungians to get America too stoned to hegemon.

(Bandung was the capital city where in 1955 Achmad Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, invited a diverse assortment of nations to posture against colonialism and the U.S. Jawaharlal Nehru, Chou En lai, Mohammed Ali of Pakistan, Kwame Nkrumah, who later became the first black president of any African nation, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the infamous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi sympathizer who had campaigned against Jews and moderate Arabs alike for more than (30) years, and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, the first black American to become a powerful figure in the United States Congress, elected from Harlem in 1945, all were given a chance to bash the West).

According to the irrefutable and ever-reliable informational gold-standard, "Wikipedia," as a result of high demand for tea, silk, and porcelain in Britain and the low demand for British goods in China, Britain had a large trade deficit with China (sound familiar?). To offset paying for these goods with silver, in the 18th century Britain began illegally exporting opium to China from British India to counter the deficit. The opium trade took off and the flow of silver reversed. The Yongzheng Emperor prohibited the sale and smoking of opium in 1729 because of the large number of addicts.

After much see-sawing on the practice for over a century, in March of 1839 the Emperor appointed Lin Zexu, a strict Confucian, to control the opium trade at Canton. Lin enforced a permanent halt to drug shipments into China, and when the British refused to end the trade, Lin imposed a trade embargo.

“On March 27, 1839,” the Wikipedia article reads, “Charles Elliot, British Superintendent of Trade, demanded that all British subjects turn over their opium to him, to be confiscated by Commissioner (Lin), amounting to nearly a year's supply of the drug. After the opium was surrendered, trade was restarted on the strict condition that no more drugs would be smuggled into China. Lin demanded that British merchants had to sign a bond promising not to deal in opium under penalty of death. The British officially opposed signing of the bond, but some British merchants that did not deal in opium were willing to sign. Lin then disposed of the opium by dissolving it with water, salt and lime and dumping it into the ocean.”

Afterwards the British contended their private property had been absconded-with, and started a shooting war, sending in troops from their Indian garrison. In 1860, at the Convention of Peking, China ratified the Treaty of Tientsin, ending the war, legalizing the import of opium, and granting a number of privileges to British (and other Western) subjects within China.

A genius like Burton will flash across the horizons of history like a comet. The space-dust, delicate charcoal and carbonaceous chondrites, signs of amino acids, and other celestial debris following him may account for that flawed percentage of his character best left unappreciated. Burton lacked respect for authority and convention, had a violent temper, an omnivorous sexuality (Burton coupled with all the aboriginal women he could, Congolese, Arab, Turkic, Abyssinian, Afghani, and as a result of his uncannily insightful reports during a military investigation of a homosexual brothel was assumed by his contemporaries to love the love that dare not speak its name), uninhibited by morals or the scrupulousness of a modern ethnologist, and he reveled in alcoholism, laughed off accusations of murder, and was possessed by a white-hot ambition.

Apart from that he was a brilliant mimic and actor, master of the mechanics of linguistics (he could speak as well as write Iranian, Hindustani, Arabic, Marathi, Sindhi, Punjabi, Telugu, Pashto, and Multani. In his travels in Asia, Africa, and South America, he learned 25 languages), swordsman, explorer and writer, Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George for his service to England. Since this is all the case, and indeed Sir Richard’s case is long-closed, and there is little dispute about the man’s character and accomplishments, he may be useful as an example of the complexity of achievement.

Any accomplishment in this world is actuated by friction.

The current media and politicians criticize that public action known as “flip-flopping;” or, taking one position today and another, tomorrow, as if all knowledge were static and all truth monolithic, instead of being the sinuous and ethereal notions they are. The opprobrium which accompanies a public figure changing his or her mind about an issue is wholly ridiculous. Educated in the Eastern school of life, where Right and Wrong and Truth and Falsehood are not mutually exclusive but merely two sides of the same greasy coin, what acerbic unprintable scorn a man like Burton would heap upon such criticism.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, why would a sane man or woman NOT “flip-flop?” We are all of us a mass of contradictions in a switcheroo world of paradox. Everybody and everything is always throwing something new at us. Why would any rational and sentient person, politician or lay, avoid an obbligato “flip-flop?” Sanity waltzes in at the nick of time, in the shape of that gay, rotund and orotund Civil War nurse from Long Island, Walt Whitman (Stave 51):

The past and present wilt-- I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

From, Song of Myself (from Leaves of Grass, 1891)
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Panama, which contains the canal Teddy Roosevelt build on the bones of a French consortium, which Jimmy Carter gave to the Red Chinese, presents many problems for anyone with an interest in history, engineering, global politics, and liberal tendencies.

In 1977 Carter agreed to give control of the Panama Canal to communist dictator General Omar Torrijos. Under the 1903 Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, the U.S. purchased the land, constructed the Canal, and was granted sovereignty over it in perpetuity. Under its agreement with Panama, China will take over $32 billion worth of U.S.-built, U.S.-owned military bases in the Canal Zone and operate from fortified positions.

Panama has signed a (50)-year lease for two ports at each end of the Canal with Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa Company, run by Li Ka-shing, who is closely associated with the Beijing regime. This gives China's Communist Party de facto control over the most strategic waterway in the West.

Happy Independence Day.
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Frozen peas, with those little onions, mix well with pasta, prosciutto and basil cream sauce. And with a little bit of black pepper, and maybe a nice glass of Chablis…

Clarence Birdseye was born in 1886 in Brooklyn, New York, a taxidermist by trade. He was made wealthy when Goldman-Sachs Trading Corporation and the Postum Company (later the General Foods Corporation) bought his patents and trademarks in 1929 for $22 million. The flash-frozen foods produced by the processes Birdseye perfected were sold for the first time in 1930 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

According to web.mit.edu, “Birdseye was a biology major at Amherst College when quit school to work as a naturalist for the U.S. government. He was posted to the Arctic, where he observed first-hand the ways of the native Americans who lived there.”

Statistical:

Sales
Total Frozen Food Sales $29.2 B
Bread Dough $590 MM
Breakfast Foods $1.06 B
Novelties $2.5 B
Ice Cream $4.8 B
Frozen Dessert/Fruit/Toppings $764 MM
Juices/Drinks $611 MM
Pizza/Snacks $3.57 B
Hors D’Oeuvers/Snacks $825 MM
Pizza $2.74 B

(Source: Information Resources, Inc. 2003, via the American Frozen Food Institute, http://www.affi.com/factstat-glance.asp)
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According to http://www.spacetoday.org/Astronauts/Animals/Dogs.html, “Laika was the first animal to go into orbit. She suffered no ill effects while she was alive in an orbit at an altitude near 2,000 miles.

“Laika had been a stray dog — mostly a Siberian husky and around three years old — rounded up from the Moscow streets and trained for spaceflight. She was carried aloft in a capsule which remained attached to the converted SS-6 intercontinental ballistic missile which rocketed her to orbit."

On the Web page, http://www.dogsinthenews.com/, the history is more complicated.

"...a secret that has been kept for 45 years was just released last week at the World Space Congress in Houston. "Laika", the first astronaut of the planet Earth, died of fright just after take-off.

"Hardly the starship Enterprise, Laika's spacecraft was no bigger than a washing machine.

"The report, presented by Dimitri Malashenkov of the Institute for Biological problems in Moscow, ended decades of speculation as to the fate of the great canine cosmonaut sent into space aboard Sputnik 2 on Nov. 3, 1957. Russian authorities had previously circulated reports that Laika survived in orbit for four days and then died when the cabin overheated due to a battery malfunction.

"In reality, medical sensors recorded that immediately after the launch, as her capsule reached speeds of nearly 18,000 miles per hour (28,800km/h), her pulse rate increased to three times its normal level, presumably due to overheating, fear and stress. Five to seven hours into the flight, no further life signs were received from Laika.

"Dr. Malashenkov's report came as a huge surprise to the scientific community.

"'The overheating story has been around,' comments Sven Grahn, a noted space historian. 'But this, dead after five to seven hours, that was a shock to me.'"

Laika's real name was "Kudryavka" (Little Curly). The world had difficulty pronouncing the word, so scientists nicknamed her "Laika", which means "Barker" and is the Russian name given to dogs of her breed (she was a Husky mix).

On the day of Laika's voyage, the New York Times printed: "the Soviet Union claimed a victory over the United States."

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OK, well, now, at last, faithful reader (which would include only myself, probably awake at 3:00 AM, nursing a Scotch, wondering what in hell ever possessed me to start a blog even my wife won’t read), I will hearken back to Herman Melville’s 1851 monumental hippogriff of a novel, Moby Dick, for yet another labored literary allusion, as a pithy parallel to my experience, here, trying to write about a single day in history.

Until this point, I have written 2-thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-six words. Melville wrote 5-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-two words in this famous chapter (“Chapter 32”), pursuant to creating, “some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera.”

Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word.

Melville was trying to write an encyclopedia of “cetology,” the study of whales, called by their Linneaean name, “cetaceans.”

"But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished,” Melville concluded,

… even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught- nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Witty man, that Melville.

In this grand literary tradition, I too will leave unremarked the Iran-Contra affair, Carol Moseley-Braun’s ascension as the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, and Hamid Karzai’s winning of Afghanistan's first presidential election in 2004. Alas, my erection, here, is smaller than even Herman’s.

Better men and women than me are editing Infoplease; their logarithms and algorithms and biorhythms, no doubt superior to mine. No more will I venture out on the guy-wired wing of "Today in History."

Although topics unrelated, the Opium Wars and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton still fascinate. I confess to liking not just those bright green flash-frozen peas and onions, but also the occasional frozen green-bean, and, with a certain alcoholic affection, when I am in my cups, a nice "Home Run Inn," frozen pepperoni pizza from my grocery's Frozen Foods Section, or even the occasional Pop-Tart from my grocer's Dairy Case (doing my little bit to support a four-point-six billion-dollar industry). I am touched and saddened by Laika the Wonder-Space-Dog’s two fictional fates, and the third, real one. First, the Soviets promised she would die humanely after eating her final, poisoned, MRE rather than die a slow death by starvation; then it was said she had died in a superheated cabin as a result of a malfunction, but after orbiting successfully for (4) days; finally we discover forty-five years later she freaked out and had a coronary shortly after lift-off, yielding the priceless scientific discovery dogs may die when rocket-propelled from a launch-pad in a tin can at 18-thousand MPH.

Yet in spite of these sideshow fascinations I have been tied to the—so to speak—whipping post by this entry, and will post no more using this posting approach. Free-associating wildly, now: I, like certain inmates of Kesey’s Oregon mental health “Combine,” who are mostly voluntarily confined, am free to go. Like Esther in The Bell Jar, "I stepped into the room," and now I am stepping out. Like the proprietor of the Asylum in The Woman in White, I have observed some curious personal changes, which “…no doubt were not without precedent in his experience of persons mentally afflicted. Insane people were often at one time, outwardly as well as inwardly, unlike what they were at another-- the change from better to worse, or from worse to better, in the madness having a necessary tendency to produce alterations of appearance externally.”

Reading this last paragraph I cast myself back to beginning of this posting, when I innocently began, “We are all of us a mass of contradictions in a switcheroo world of paradox. Everybody and everything is always throwing something new at us.”

Now I have “newly,” discovered that as a format for blogging, the "This Day in History,” approach has, in a charming construct of piquant Midwest vernacular, slapped me and called me Sally.

Farewell. Short, and to the point, we muster all our forces forward.