Sunday, December 20, 2020

Borshch

My friend Bill, from Little Rock, loves to post recipes on his Face Book page, and his frequent mention (and pictures) of borshch triggered a whopping nostalgia in me as the weather turned cold and I remembered the days when I became an avid convert to things Russian when I was at the Army Language School back in the early 60s. In those days there was a sizable Russian immigrant community living in the Clement St. area in the Richmond District of San Francisco. They've all died off now and the place has come to be called the New Chinatown.

When I got out of the army and came to live in San Francisco in 1965, the Russian tea houses and the Znanie Bookstore were still there and I got to hear - not so much use - Russian on a regular basis. I didn't have a lot of money, but fortunately the borshch and piroshki lunches that I managed to have about once a week were within my price range, and to this day they remain a kind of comfort food for me. The Russians were the reason I sought out the Richmond district to live in, and I got my first apartment as a grown-up person now forever financially independent of my parents (or the U.S. Army) with army friend Jerry Rodgers on the corner of 14th and Anza, within walking distance of several Russian restaurants. 

I learned to make piroshki - the beef and boiled egg variety - and regularly had friends over for borshch and piroshki dinners. Imagine my surprise when I looked up recipes for both recently and realized how much work they were. In those early days in the 60s they were simply fun to make. Everything was a grand adventure, and I never associated making food with "work."

All that has changed. When I decided I'd make borshch yesterday I quickly decided I'd leave the piroshki for another time. I don't have the stamina I once did.  My idea of exercise these days is walking to my chair in front of the fire.

In the early days, I was pretty pro-Russian, culturally, if not politically, so I just assumed these were quintessentially Russian dishes. It took a lot of convincing for me to accept that the Ukrainians might have at least as much claim to the dish, or that the Poles and their pirogi got to the idea of these meat (or potatoes) filled donuts first.

But my superchef husband, Taku, who has a whole library of good Japanese cook books, and has acquired a good background on food lore, insists that borshch was originally Ukrainian and that I should follow a Ukrainian recipe if I were going to make it. I thought for a moment about just following a Russian recipe online (the video version, now that YouTube runs our lives) and telling him it was Ukrainian. But I knew I couldn't lie to him about anything so sacred as food, and went with a Ukrainian recipe in the end. When we sat down to dinner last night, I had the best borshch I've ever eaten. Of course, it could just be that it has been so long since I made it or ate it in a restaurant that I simply forgot how much I love the dish. I can't believe I've gone so long without it!

The secret was no doubt that I went for a meat recipe. They used pork ribs and the result was there was more of a savory full-flavored meat and vegetable taste than a beet taste. It wasn't the borshch of the old days, but it was an incredibly tasty meal, and I'm most certainly going to do it again.

I've been moving steadily in the direction of vegetarianism over the years, but I'm getting near the end of my days and I've decided it's about time to go with things that look good, feel good and taste good instead or things that might enable me to live forever. If it don't taste good, ain't no way it's going on my table anymore. 

Thought I'd share the recipe. 

You'll need a soup pot for the final product, a separate saucepan to cook the potatoes in, and a large fry pan to sauté the beet, tomato paste and garlic in.

Ingredients:
  • about a pound of pork ribs. If you use bone-in, you'll have to pull them out of the pot and separate and throw away the bone, at some point. I used boneless. I leave it to you to decide how much fat to leave on. Don't cut it all off; it provides flavor.
  • 1 medium-sized onion, chopped
  • 2 carrots, grated
  • 1 large beet, peeled and grated
  • tomato paste, a large spoonful
  • 2 or 3 potatoes, chopped small
  • 1/4 of a head of cabbage, shredded, maybe a bit more
  • parsley in two separate bunches, one whole bunch and one chopped
  • fresh dill, some chopped for soup, some chopped or left whole for garnish
  • 1 or 2 bay leaves
  • salt and pepper
  • 3 garlic cloves, pressed or finely chopped
  • sour cream
  1. Brown the ribs on both sides in the borshch (soup) pot, where everything will end up eventually, and transfer to the second pot with about 8 cups of water and a bunch of parsley, which you will eventually discard. Simmer for an hour or more.
  2.  As they are browning, grate the carrots and the beet (food processor or hand grater) and set aside.
  3.  Add the chopped potatoes to the beef pot and continue to simmer until cooked but still firm, another 15-20 minutes. Or skip this step - it makes no sense to me - and just add the chopped potatoes with the cabbage later on. (See #7 below.) I followed the recipe as I found it, because I like to do that the first time I try things to get a base line.
  4.  In the first pot, brown the onions in the pork fond (the grease and particles left over after browning) and add the grated carrots to the same pot and cook for a minute or two. Add a little of the potato water if you need to at the end to prevent burning and sticking.
  5. Sauté the grated beet with the tomato paste and garlic and add to the onions and carrots.
  6. Separate the meat from the bone, if you've used bone-in meat. And discard the parsley, as well. Then add everything to the first pot: meat, potatoes and cooking liquid.
  7. Add the shredded cabbage.
  8. Add a good bit of salt and pepper and the bay leaves, chopped dill and chopped parsley.
  9. Simmer for a couple hours, adding boiling water as necessary to keep the borshch thick but not too soupy. Remove from heat when it feels done and reheat before serving. Or, better yet, just leave it on a slow simmer until you're ready to eat. But watch out it doesn't burn.
  10. Garnish each bowl with sour cream and dill when serving. Serve with dark bread.
I'm inclined to see recipes which ask you to cook something and set it aside to be added later as too fussy. Why not just put everything in at the same time and cook till it's all done? Isn't that the best way to marry flavors, in the end? My Japanese chef husband wants to smack me hard when I say things like that. I'm not the ultimate authority. But I do think it's probably a good idea to sauté things separately when you can before adding them to water. In a recipe like this, which cooks for hours, the potatoes will lose their separate character, so I don't think it matters much whether you cook them separately before adding to the stew-like mix, but I do think the onions should be cooked before adding, and many recipes suggest cooking the beets before adding as well. I leave it to you to find your own food guru.

A side note on the spelling of borshch. Borshch, in English, is generally spelled "borscht" and that comes, if I am not mistaken, from the Yiddish version of the soup: באָרשט‎  (bawrsht), i.e., with a "t" at the end, brought to the U.S. by Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. I'm using the transliteration of the Russian/Ukrainian (they are the same) word: борщ, b-o-r-shch.  The letter щ is pronounced like the -sti in the way most Americans pronounced the word "Christian," where the s turns into an sh.  Khrushchev, is spelled Хрущев, by the way, if you'll permit me to beat this point into the ground.

If you do make it, and it makes you feel all warm and cozy, drink a toast to all the decent Russians there are out there in this big wide world. Forget the Trumpian ones that hacked into our security services, murdered Kashoggi and invaded the Crimea. Watch a YouTube video of one of my top three favorite pianists (just below Martha Argerich and just ahead - but not by much - of Cateen, aka Sumino Hayato): Alexander Malofeev, playing Poulenc with Sandro Nebieridze. And remember that these two boys come from countries now very hostile to each other, one run by Putin and one the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.  Georgians eat borshch also. Here's a Georgian recipe for borshch virtually identical to the one above, with celery and coriander added. 


Photo credit: The photo above is from the Wikipedia site on borsht. I should have thought to take a picture of the borsht we had for supper last night, but it's all gone and so this is the best I can do.

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Pablo y Kiko


If you're a member of a despised or threatened minority group, you'll be familiar with the practice of "tribal spotting." A Jewish friend of mine once told me that the first thing he does when he enters a room full of strangers is to see if he can figure out who the other Jews are. I once had a group of gay friends who would get together regularly. We used to laugh at one member of the group who spent most of his time whispering about celebrities and wondering if they were members of the tribe. We used to tease him about being able to spot which fire hydrants were gay and which were straight.

You do that as a defense mechanism. It's always important, when the world is out to get you, to know who you might turn to in a pinch. Totally understandable.

I'm lucky to live in a part of the country, in a part of the world, where gay people are no longer despised and unwelcome. And that means fussing over who's gay and who's not is a practice worth tossing out. But some of us are too conditioned to paranoid behavior to be able to do that. Some of us fear the South (or wherever the homophobes live) will rise again.

Jewish paranoia, given the long tradition of anti-Semitism, is not unjustified. In Germany alone, from Luther to Hitler it lay just below the surface, waiting for a Trump kind of low-life to dog whistle it to the surface. Or, in Hitler's case, to make it national policy.  Even today, although Germany has done an excellent job, in my view, of shaking off that curse, it still pops up.  Nobody can forget the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where marchers shouted "Jews will not replace us!" 

We inherited the Jewish fear of extinction which led the ancient Hebrews to come up with the notion that all non-reproductive sex - masturbation, prostitution, and of course homosexual acts, had to be proscribed. The Catholic Church picked it up and ran with it because they needed to control marriage so that they could control property. The Jews are OK with birth control these days. Not so the Church of Rome.

That means lesbians and gays pretty much had to wait until the power of the church waned sufficiently for there to be some room for people to stop fussing over other people's sexual practices. And of course it's not just the Catholics. Authoritarian Protestant groups like the fundamentalists and Mormons took the same path in focusing on Old Testament injunctions against same-sex practices.

This topic was once front and center in American life when gay people decided to put their efforts into supporting same-sex marriage. There were always two distinct subgroups among LGBT people: those who wanted nothing more than to be seen and accepted as "normal," and have the same civil rights that heterosexual citizens had, and those who wanted the opposite - to be noticed as different, whether

scene from the documentary "Queer Japan"
motived by the need to signal their gay identity to other gays, or out of a love of theater and the recognition of the power of satire to poke fun at the absurdity of rigid gender distinctions. Some went for flashy clothes, and some pushed "noticeable" into the outrageous. These days the drag queens with the Dolly Parton hair are still with us (and I hope they will always be - who needs more dull people?) But most of the rest of us have retired into an attitude of "who cares?" People who are happy with their own sexuality are seldom preoccupied with the sexuality of others. And now that we are free to be gay, it's time, they (we) say, to stop trying to identify all the gay fire hydrants.

I'm focused on this topic at the moment because of a wonderful video that showed up on YouTube of two guys dancing together. They are Pablo and Kiko, and you should have a look. Unless you're a homophobe, it will bring a smile to your face to watch these two professional dancers do what they do so well, evidently spontaneously, and showing off their tremendous talent.

For me, the delight increased when friends launched into the the (still) inevitable question of whether these guys were gay or straight and I realized that my first response was, "What does it matter? They make me feel good." They present themselves as straight, and I think one should begin by accepting what people say about themselves as true. The delight is in the fact that straight people no longer need to bend themselves into pretzels proving they're not gay. If these guys are straight, they're having such a great time being sensual, even sexual, with each other, without any evident concern for the possibility gay people like my fire hydrant friend are going to insist they're gay. It simply doesn't matter.

Things do get better.

Check out this video. The dance they are doing is a modified bachata, a dance originally from the Dominican Republic. The dancers are from Spain and they have added bits from salsa and tango to the mix and smoothed out the boxstep with silky hip movements. And it doesn't hurt that they've got great music to dance to, "The Kiss" by Pablo Alborán.  Look at it and celebrate the progress of gay liberation, and the fact that we can now respond to the gay identification question with a hearty "Who the hell cares?" Or just enjoy the beauty of two dancers doing what they do so well.

Pablo y Kiko.


Sunday, December 13, 2020

Not my favorite Californians

My friend Bill and I have been tossing around the question of whether what's going on is a coup attempt. If you think of a coup exclusively in military terms, it was not. And because it was so incompetently planned, and never actually got off the ground, you'd have to call it a coup manqué. That's French for, well, you know...

Four California Republicans signed on to the coup attempt led by State Attorney General Ted Paxton of Texas when he filed a lawsuit to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Their names are Ken Calvert, Kevin McCarthy, Doug La Malfa and Tom McLintock.

It's one thing when white supremacists from Alabama or Mississippi attempt to halt, or at least slow down, the ragged American plodding toward a more-inclusive national culture since it first formed a government in which only white males could vote. I feel a great sympathy for the progressive citizens of those states who have to live with those retrograde forces with their hands on the local controls, but I don't really feel a strong affinity or sense of responsibility for what goes on there. I do however care very much when I see similar backwardness in my home state of California. I identify as a Californian and when I see abuse by its political leaders, I take it personally. So when I noted that there were actually four of them, I sat up and took notice. And don't take Bill's or my word for it. David Blount, a state senator from Mississippi called it a coup, and so did Attorney General William Tong of Connecticut. 

The Spanish word for coup d'état is golpe de estado.  And you've got to love the Germans for coming up with an actual onomatopoeia: Putsch!  The Putschists (puccisti?) didn't pull it off because all but two members of the Supreme Court recognized that Texas did not have standing, and even those two (Thomas and Alito) said they would reject the effort even if the court had taken the case.

Others are maintaining (see Ross Douthat in today's New York Times Review section) that it wasn't a real coup because they had to know they couldn't get the play through the court and what they were up to was a kind of performance art, designed to drum up support for Trump in the future, rather than a legal move. As far as I'm concerned, however, if it crawls on its belly like a coup and stands on its hind legs like a coup, it's a coup.

Let me move on to the four Californians. I checked out their background to see what makes them tick. What I found had me nodding "of course, of course." Just what I expected. Classic foot-draggers. Modern world? No, not me. Just look at the record the four of them have created for themselves since they were first elected:

1. Ken Calvert - California is a microcosm of American political sentiment, with progressives in the cities and conservatives in the rural areas. Ken Calvert represents the 42nd Congressional District, that rural district east of L.A. and south of Riverside that is solidly Republican. No surprises there. But Calvert's politics are not merely conservative. Among his positions are a strongly anti-abortion stance, and a requirement that teenage girls seeking an abortion must get their parents' permission. He's opposed to the creation of any new gun laws, to the Affordable Care Act, and to amnesty for any illegal aliens living in the U.S. He opposed same-sex marriage rights and marijuana as therapy for returning military, even if approved by their doctors. He admitted to having sex with a prostitute in his car when stopped by the police in his hometown, but was not arrested, because there were no witnesses.

2. Kevin McCarthy -  Kevin McCarthy represents California's 23rd Congressional District and has done so for the past thirteen years. He's Boehner's successor as House Minority Leader so he's one of the power brokers. The 23rd is in South Central California, centered in Bakersfield. It borders on the Mojave Desert, is largely rural and 76% white. Republican till the cows come home, in other words. McCarthy voted to defund Planned Parenthood, no surprise. Nor is it surprising that he votes the full party platform, and is known for having boasted that the Benghazi investigations against Hillary Clinton is what brought her down, thus demonstrating that the attacks on her were instrumental ones. It was not about truth-seeking. He was similarly shady about his support for Trump during the impeachment, and also for QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia for a time. He opposed proxy voting in the house to help lower the risk of spreading Covid-19, and tried (and failed) to sue Nancy Pelosi for even suggesting the idea. He proposed a bill that would make the Hyde Amendment permanent, a means of preventing government funding for abortion. He does not accept that there is scientific consensus on climate change and consistently opposes both domestic and international efforts to deal with such. He was primary author of efforts to strip 60 million acres of public lands of protection against logging, mineral and fossil fuel extraction. He supported Israel's annexation of the West Bank. He's one of the leaders of the efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. When Trump suspended DACA, he opposed efforts to protect these child immigrants. He opposed same-sex marriage and efforts to legalize marijuana.

As I write this, the little voice in my head asks me, "Why are you stating the obvious. The guy's a Republican, for Christ's sake! 

3. Doug La Malfa - Represents California's 1st Congressional District, the technical name for which has to be "serious boonies" - the northeasternmost corner of the state. It has gone Democratic at times, but La Malfa has represented the district since he was first elected in 2012 and reelected four times. He is a fourth-generation rice farmer, and is the recipient of the largest amount of money ever from government agricultural subsidies. He also oversees agricultural subsidies as a member of the House Agricultural Committee. (But note the ambiguity in the reporting on that issue by the local paper.) He's got an A rating from the NRA and the Human Rights Campaign calls him "one of the most 'anti-LGBT' politicians in congress." He was an early supporter of the effort to overturn Affirmative Action and favored giving local law enforcement the right to act as immigration enforcement officers. He succeeded in getting a law passed which prevents the state from seizing guns even in a national emergency. He opposed the teaching in schools of the history of the gay rights movement and efforts to overturn the Electoral College system. He rejects, like McCarthy, the consensus on climate change. 

Again - a Republican. And you expected maybe a Quaker?

4. Tom McLintock -  Represents California's 4th Congressional District, the great "Empty Quarter" of the state, from Truckee down to the edge of Sequoia National Park, the part of the state comprised largely of national forests, including Yosemite, and arguably the most beautiful part of the state. Urban it is not. McLintock only today addressed Congress and made great sense in criticizing the lockdown as being unfairly applied. Problem is, rather than addressing the unfair application of the law, he argues for lifting the lockdown entirely, despite the fact that it is now roundly recognized throughout the world as being an appropriate measure as the Corona virus continues to spike.  In 2008, McLintock voted against Prop. 2, which would have prohibited the confinement of animals in cages too small to allow them to stretch out their legs. "Farm animals are food, not friends." (Wikipedia on Tom McLintock). The following year he promised to vote against any taxes that would support legislation to prevent global warming. In his five terms in office he sponsored three bills, one to help the Miwok Indians and two to rename post offices. He doubts the science on climate change and is opposed to same-sex marriage. He has, however, supported the legalization of marijuana. He would like to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

There. A quick-and-dirty overview of some of our proud California congressmen of the Republican persuasion, and further confirmation of the rural-urban divide in America. (I won't make any attempts to bring in wealth or religion or race as explanatory factors, which I'm not sure I could do. What does show up, though, nice and clearly is the urban-rural divide.) I would question those who justify these Trump-no-matter-what-he-does supporters on the grounds they are afraid of losing their seats in the future. All of these guys come from totally Republican areas. The question is going to be whether supporting the Trump coup attempt will hurt them in the future. That depends on how far right and uninformed or uncaring the citizens of these districts are. I'm hoping they can be made aware of what wretched representation in Congress they have saddled themselves with.

I don't know what I expected to accomplish by laying these facts out. I just wanted to know what these advocates of a legal coup looked like up closer than I would normally want to look at them.

I'm not sorry I did. It reminds me once again that people who claim there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats are out of their ever-lovin' minds.

And that may be the cherry on top of all the obvious understatements I've made in the last one hundred years.






Sunday, December 6, 2020

Can we do it two cents at a time?

I’m sure no sooner had some prehistoric Bill Gates type first observed what happened when you rubbed two sticks together than the world divided itself into what we today call glass half-full and glass half-empty types. The former would stress the fact that "we can now keep warm and make food taste better;” the latter would worry about their house burning down and how they were going to treat all the village idiots who insisted no government was going to take away their right to stick their hands in the flames.


These days we are waking up to the fact that the computer age has brought a similar test of intelligence. There are those who see the internet as a huge leap forward in spreading information. And those who understand that for every soul it lifts out of provincialism and ignorance it also provides an opportunity to listen to more deceptive politicians or TV evangelists than ever before, more opportunity to exhibit what, if you like to use fancy-talk, you might label epistemic incapacity. You might also prefer the more down-home term, bullshit.


Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Specifically, it deals with the difference between verifiable fact and arbitrary opinion based on a desire to mold reality according to one’s desires. History records Gutenberg's invention of the printing press as a great-leap-forward moment in history. It downplays the fact that we now had a mechanism for spreading misinformation and prejudice. Martin Luther made Germans literate by translating the Bible and making priests redundant. But he also helped foster the anti-Semitism that was out and about in Germany at the time. Then it was the printed word; these days it's the spoken word delivered through television and computer, that is the primary mixed blessing of the age. It can inform and educate, but it can also misinform and deceive, if you don’t have the basic capacity to tell the difference between accurate information and bullshit. Like fire, it is not a solution to all our problems, but a tool that requires discipline and training to use properly.


Over the past four years, we’ve reeled in shock at how often Americans have ignored outrageous deception on the part of our political leaders - Trump in particular, but the problem was never limited to one person. And now that the majority of Americans have thrown the bum out, we are still faced with daily evidence of just how dumbed down the population has become. I’m thinking of such things as the resistance to wearing masks in the face of Covid-19. 


I love that Steven Weinberg quote: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.” And I would amend that to include not just evil but also rank stupidity. In many Christian churches people drink communion wine from the same chalice. In the Greek Orthodox Church, they use a spoon, and, even in the midst of the Corona pandemic, traditionalists are arguing that God would not want us to alter the practice. And will keep us safe.


Americans are no smarter and no dumber than the rest of the world, of course. In Germany the new rightist party, the AfD (Alternative for Germany), are fighting over whether to get behind the national “Mundschutz” (i.e., “mouth protection”) policy.  Never mind that the protection they’re arguing over should cover the nose as well as the mouth. The fact that virtually any medical authority anywhere will tell you the risk of spreading infection is lowered considerably by its use. This is not an issue we should be wasting our time arguing over.


I understand that there is a debate over whether the high cost of these protection measures, masking and physical distancing, is too big a price to pay. People who see up close the damage done to people living in isolation, the damage to kids who can’t get out to go to school or play with their friends, the risk of bankrupting countless businesses, are making good sense. It’s a judgment call whether to prioritize the health of the economy and psychological well-being over people’s individual lives, particularly the old and the physically compromised. I see it as a moral issue. For me lives come first, but I understand there are lots of people out there who don’t feel any obligation to protect the general public, and no doubt assume taking their chances is a reasonable course of action. And we have to live with these people.


I just wish we had better mechanisms to expose the sources of misinformation effectively. I admit I don’t know how to do it. Some urge patient interaction and the need to communicate effectively and not surrender to righteous indignation. I feel a responsibility to move in that direction. But I find it so damned hard. It’s bad enough at normal times to have to listen to people who believe in astrology and make decisions on the basis of Tarot cards. But these are life-and-death times, and when you find people listening to known liars and self-serving politicians, isn’t it irresponsible to go on about the importance of the “free exchange of information?”

 

I’m currently going through all the lectures, debates and panel discussions I can find over this fascinating man, Jordan Peterson, and trying to decide whether his “free speech” stance makes him heroic or just another fool who doesn’t know how to use his nose to smell the coffee. I’m not on the fence. I’m for free speech, and I buy his argument that responsibility is central and we can’t run a democracy without maximizing the uninhibited flow of information, and that we can’t let our personal assessment of the accuracy of that information distract us.

 

But it’s hard. Super hard to suffer fools when lives are at stake.

 

I welcome anyone who wants to contribute to the discussions I’ve been having with friends on this issue of free speech to chime in. Please don’t just simply declare you’re for free speech. Please tell me why, at this particular time, in the midst of plague, we can’t do anything about the bullshit. Other than continue to put in our two cents, I mean.

 

 

 

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

The Crown - a review

Part I - Toying with the notions of fate vs. personal responsibility for the life one leads


I had a great time recently bingeing on The Crown. Great production. Great acting. I mean, how can you beat Helena Bonham-Carter playing Princess Margaret? And who would have thought FBI Agent Dana Scully of the X-Files could turn herself into Dame Margaret Thatcher? Gillian Anderson pulled it off brilliantly, I thought. The show is well worth watching just for the acting.


I’ve always felt sorry for the British royal family. The Japanese royal family too. Seems to me you have to have done something thoroughly wicked in a former life to be born into the slavish roles that those wretched families have designed for you to play, where you are fated to live virtually entirely according to other people’s expectations. That’s true for all royal families to one degree or another; it’s just that I think the British and Japanese royals have done it the most sadistically.


I have a Danish friend who is convinced, as am I, that one of the great mistakes the Founding Fathers made was to put the head of state and the head of nation into the same person. The result is you get a politician - who must of necessity get their hands dirty to get things done in a world which cannot operate without compromises, some of which steal your soul. Better to have a king, he argues, and he thinks, with good reason, that the Scandinavians and the Dutch have done it the right way: created royals who retain much more of their ordinary citizen characteristics. But I think the Germans have the better solution: get yourself a respected senior statesperson, one who can reflect integrity and intellect and the best side of the nation and make them president. And then get yourself a prime minister to do the shitwork.


America has come up with terribly imperfect beings in both categories with its two-for-one approach. But so, it seems to me, have the British, with their not-ready-for-primetime royals working hand-in-hand with the likes of Boris Johnson.


But, to get back to the somewhat fictionalized version of royals on The Crown, if you want to believe the writers reflect what the real royals are like, more or less, you’ll develop more than a little sympathy for both Prince Charles and Diana. The Queen and Prince Phillip do a really heavy number on them for not being able to suck it up and conform to their expectations of how a royal is supposed to behave.  


People are quite sympathetic to Diana. They understand she was still a child when she was tapped to produce a future heir and a spare for the British throne. Bred, groomed, squeezed, molded, as opposed to raised, fostered, educated or mentored. You have no say in the contract. Others determine that you should have wealth and people to wait on you right and left in exchange for cutting ribbons and smiling from balconies. Charles had a much harder time of it. He wants his friend Camilla to share his days and nights with, not some ditzy girl who’s bound to steal his thunder. Both of them fall short, but for some complex reasons, Diana seems to have ridden off into history as a victim to be pitied, while Charles comes across as a complete dolt. Which makes me sympathetic to him.


Andrew Eaton, and Stephen Daldry,  the producers, and Peter Morgan, the chief writer of the series, just completed Season 4 of the series - and I understand there are two more in the offing. They chose entertainment over accuracy, and aimed for ways to capture the essence of their characters rather than imitate them or stick to historical facts in every detail. The actual royals, if you follow the gossip sheets, are justified in getting pissed off at the liberties taken. But it’s part of the deal. You get to be a royal. We get to not only force you to play the roles we want you to play; we get to play with your images in any way we choose.  You belong to us, baby, for all your crown jewels.


It beats being born in poverty and raised in ignorance, I imagine. But I wouldn’t exchange the life fate has given me in a million years for life as a British (or Japanese, or virtually any other) royal.  


The Crown still falls under the rubric of royalty porn. We'll have to wait a while longer for history to evolve and for this sort of thing to go out of style.


Just read in the news today that the first thing the Pilgrims did when landing in Plymouth was steal the corn of the Wampanoag Indians, who had been nearly wiped out from a plague and couldn't resist.


Man. What a species.


Dogs, I tell you. Put your faith in dogs, not in the human species.


Wonder if I can hold out for the true story on the Irish potato famine.


Guess it all depends on who gets to tell the story.



Playing with dukes and earls and baronets and bastards

 

Part II

Am posting three blog entries today, the film review on Uncle Frank was written third and has nothing to do with the others. The Crown review was written first and this one was written second. But I don't think it matters which one you read first, so I'm not going to fuss.  I add this bit of information just in case something turns out to be out of order.


Happy Thanksgiving!


At dinner the other night, when discussing Season 4 of The Crown, my Japanese spouse commented in passing that he has trouble distinguishing (or caring about) the different ranks of the peerage, and that sent me to google "peerage" after dinner, since I don't have a real grasp of the differences myself. Next thing I know, a week has gone by and I'm still at it. Not full time. I'm not totally mad, but a good part of each day.   For a time I got distracted by all sorts of trivia, how Victoria wasn’t perhaps not the prissy tight-ass I thought she was, but a great lover of life who fell madly in love with a her cousin Albert, had nine children with him, and then went nearly frantic when he up and died on her at the age of 42. But then went on to have erotic, but probably platonic, relations with two more men later in life. See Judy Dench play Victoria in Mrs. Brown, for one of those stories. And check out the story of her lover? called “the Munshi”, for the other.

I decided at one point in my life that 42 was the perfect age for a man - old enough to have worked out the foolishness of youth, but still young and vigorous enough to be able to get the most out of life. For Victoria to have lost her lover/husband at 42 strikes me as an act of pure cruelty on the part of a divinity, I should think, if I’m going to blame the gods, and not the abstract notion of fate, for such a turn of events.  

And speaking of being f***ed by the fickle finger of fate, as I was in the last blog entry, I spent a day or more tracking the life of Victoria and Albert’s youngest grandchild, Prince Charles Edward, Duke of Albany. Because Victoria and Albert were both of the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Victoria tapped Charles Edward at the age of fourteen to go to Germany and become the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. Imagine sending a boy still wet behind the ears off to a hostile country where he doesn’t speak the language and where he is destined to be an outsider, to military school where he would be expected to prove his manhood by marching in the ice and snow, under the tutelage of his much older cousin, the pompous twit who became Kaiser Wilhelm II. Enough to drive anyone mad. Caught up in the English/German mutual hostility of the First World War, Charles Edward went off the deep end. The English cut off his English titles because he was now German, the Germans took away his German title in 1918 when Germany became a Republic. Freaked him out. Fearful, like many Germans, of a Russian takeover, he joined forces with Hitler and became convinced, bad as Hitler was, he had more to offer the Germans than any alternative, democracy being a virtual unknown phenomenon. Americans who followed Trump are in no position to throw stones at that glass house, but what a legacy to give to your children.

It’s easy to blame Prince Charles for being annoyed at his wife, Diana, for stealing his thunder, and at having to wait so long to be king. And Charles Edward for not being able to see that supporting a leader that was euthanizing the mentally ill and ultimately the cause of the greatest misery in modern times. But how does one find the courage to step out of the role the gods (or grandmother Queen Victoria) determines you must play?


Love this game of historical trivia.


And at the risk of being a party pooper and dwelling on the obvious, I don't want to suggest that I'm a fan of monarchy and gossiping about royals. I'm not. I slept in a bedroom in Nova Scotia as a kid with a picture of Queen Victoria on the wall, and I know how what I'm about to do in dwelling even for a moment on the peerage suggests I too can get suckered in by the human folly of dressing their little girls up as princesses and fantasizing about being the focus of sycophants. Trust me. That's not it. I am as familiar with the seven years of famine Ireland suffered under Victoria and the entire history of the British subjugation of India as I am with the fact that Hitler and Goering loved dogs and children. This is a parlor game I'm engaging in, not a sign of affection. A distraction not unlike a jigsaw puzzle in the time of plague.


With that let me turn to what I'm calling my "high school term paper."


I doubt what follows will capture that many eyeballs, but just in case you happen to be curious, I’m posting my notes, and inviting friends to correct me where I might have gone astray of the facts, or put a slant on something that rubs you the wrong way. Please do chime in with comments:


Dukes and Viscounts and Earls, and all that...


As a New Englander raised with a consciousness of my English-Canadian roots and as a native speaker of English, I feel a closer connection to Britain than any nation outside my own, with Germany coming in as Number Two because I was raised by a German-born mother and grandmother. So when asked by my Japanese husband to explain what it is about The Crown that has such a power to draw me in, I went directly to the British class system and peerage - the hierarchy of folk from ruling monarch to least powerful commoner that gives even Americans their basic understanding of a class structure. So let me start there, by using the British class structure as a foundation and tossing in German and other European terms for purposes of contrast.


It’s more a high school book report on the British nobility, than a serious study. As I say, I prepared for my Japanese husband ignoring the fact that he almost certainly will tune out within the first three to five minutes of my presentation. I press on all the same. We’re in Covid lockdown. What can I say?



Another name for the House of Lords is the House of Peers and “the peerage” is a synonym for “the nobility,” those who rank below royalty but above commoners.  It is open to anybody with a title.


If you see yourself as something other than a common man or woman, you are one of the following, moving from top to bottom in a British sort of way:


Emperor - a title derived from the Roman Emperor (Imperator) Augustus and his successors, a man who is, except in the days when the Christian pope took prominence, was subject to no other earthly authority.  An emperor holds sway over an empire, a unit comprised of multiple kingdoms. He contrasts with a king who holds sway over a single kingdom. Not really a British thing. It was proposed that George III take the title, but he thought being king was quite enough, thank you. Victoria was OK with being Empress of India, but she didn’t actually use it elsewhere.


Empress - there are three types of empresses:


  1. Empress Regnant, equivalent to an Emperor, if she rules in her own right;

  2. Empress Consort, if she acquires the title by means of marriage to an Emperor

  3. Empress Dowager, if she is the mother of an Emperor


Only one emperor exists at present, the Emperor of Japan, a man without actual political authority. Japan does not currently allow for a female to take the imperial throne.


Historically, emperors may be elected, as was the case in the days of the Holy Roman Empire, or they may be seen to derive their authority as direct descendants of the Roman Empire, by means of a process known as translatio imperii.  Once in power, though, an emperor tends pass on the job to his heirs.


The German equivalent was the Kaiser, a word derived from Caesar. There were only ever three of them:


  • Wilhelm I (1871–1888);

  • Friedrich III (9 March-15 June 1888), who ruled for 99 days;

  • Wilhelm II (1888–1918), during whose reign the monarchy in Germany ended near the end of World War I

 

The Russian equivalent was the Tsar, sometimes written Czar, also derived from Caesar, in power until 1917, when Tsar Nicholas and his family were slaughtered by the Bolsheviks.


Britain became an empire when Victoria declared herself Empress of India in 1876 and stopped being an actual empire in 1947 when India and Pakistan were given independence, making George VI and his wife Elizabeth the last British Emperor and Empress; their daughter, the current Queen Elizabeth, never used the title Empress, although the “British Empire” persisted de facto until Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 and the term was replaced by “British Commonwealth,” a body of sixteen nations of equal status. Historically, however, it was also in use between 960 A.D. when Athelstan declared himself emperor, and 1066 when authority was assumed by the Norman invaders.


Basileus - βασιλεύς - (plural: basileis) the Greek equivalent of king or emperor, in use in the Byzantine Empire. The feminine forms are basileia (βασίλεια), basilis (βασιλίς), basilissa (βασίλισσα), or the archaic basilinna (βασιλίννα), meaning "queen" or "empress." As with an emperor, authority was seen to derive by means of translatio imperii from ancient times, in this case the Byzantine Empire.


King - also King Regnant (reigning king)


There are currently three kings who are reigning as absolute monarchs: in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Eswatini; and twelve kings who are heads of sovereign states: Norway, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Jordan, Morocco, Thailand, Bhutan, Cambodia, Tonga and Lesotho.


The word is derived from the Germanic kuningas, as are the words for king in other Germanic languages. Other titles around the world which translate as “king” include: Archon, Basileus, Lugal, Kabaka. Mepe, Malik, Melekh, Mwami, Negus, Oba, Raja, Rex, Rí, Shah and Tagavor.


Queen - as with Empress, there are three types of queens


  1. Queen Regnant, when ruling in her own right. There is only one at present: Queen Elizabeth II of the British Commonwealth.

  2. Queen Consort, the wife of a “king regnant,” a reigning king

  3. Dowager Queen, also known as the Queen Mother, the widow of a king.


While the wife of a king make take the ceremonial title of “Queen Consort,” the husband of a queen regnant may not take “king” as a ceremonial title. Both Queen Victoria’s and the current Queen Elizabeth’s husbands were given the title, “Prince Consort.”


Prince


A prince, in Britain, may refer to a “royal prince,” a dynastic cadet, the son of a king or queen, or their direct heirs, or to a “prince consort,” such as Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. The title may also refer to a “sovereign prince,” the reigning monarch of a principality, a territory smaller than a kingdom, as is the case in Liechtenstein and Monaco. This distinction is captured in the two words in German and Dutch which translate into “prince” in English: “Prinz/prins,” a royal prince, and Fürst/Vorst, a sovereign prince. Heir to the throne, Prince Charles, and Prince Albert of Monaco are rendered in German and Dutch as Prinz/prins Charles and Fürst/Vorst Albert. The Scandinavian and the Slavic languages make the same distinction. It’s worth noting that in some cases a Fürst can outrank a duke and in other cases it’s the other way around. In Britain, a prince always outranks a duke. It’s also worth mentioning that “prince” and “Fürst” are not totally parallel concepts, since the term Fürst, in German, can be used in the sense of “monarch,” i.e., to refer to a king, as well.


To make matters more complicated, princes (like Prince Charles) can also be dukes (Prince Charles = Duke of Cambridge) and members of the nobility can hold several noble ranks simultaneously. Prince Charles’ son, William, is simultaneously Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, the Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus. Normally one uses the highest rank as title and the others are treated as honorary titles.


In the Middle East, the equivalent of a principality is an emirate, the ruling monarch of which is called an emir. Additionally, from the 16th century onward, kings in France created principalities rules by princes outside the normal succession to a monarchy and with no link to a royal family.


Princess


The daughter of a king or queen or the wife of a prince. (And note the parallel titles of Fürstin, etc., the equivalent in other languages for princess.)


Duke


A duke, in Britain and in Continental Europe, may be an actual male ruler of a duchy or sovereign of another small state or territory or he may hold the title only ceremonially. His status, known as a dukedom, is the highest ranking noble status, second only to that of a king, and just above the next rank down, that of a marquess. A royal duke is considered a monarch.


A dukedom is an inherited title, passed from father to son. It is a title commonly given to princes when they marry, but may be given to them at any time. Each dukedom is created for a particular individual, who takes his name from the territory the original duke of the line was granted with the first bequeathing of the title. At the death of a duke without an heir, the title may be transferred to a relative or it may become extinct. Today, the titles are honorary only (they don’t come with land), and are limited in number. There are currently five royal dukedoms in use; sixteen remain available.


At the time of Elizabeth II’s coronation, there were only 28 non-royal dukedoms left. And that number is now down to 24. Victoria created the last one in 1889, so non-royal dukedoms are on their way out.


Outside of Britain, as well, as democracy has spread to more and more countries, modern states have eliminated the title, although dukedoms may still be found in Austria, Bohemia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Italy (including the Papal States), Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.


The word is derived from the Latin dux/ducis (Greek δούξ), meaning “leader.” Romance languages use some variant of duc or duca. Germanic languages, as well as other Eastern European languages use Herzog or some variant (Old English heretoga; derived from heri ‘army’ + ziohanto lead; Swedish: hertig) and the Slavic languages use voivoda or some variant. These terms create the image of a warrior king and his generals, modified by being brought into the salon, but “leaders” all the same.


A duchy, when not part of a larger kingdom but an independent territory in its own right, may be called a “Grand Duchy” - Luxembourg is an example and governed by  “Grand Duke”


Duchess 


A duchess is the wife or widow or daughter of a duke, or a woman holding the rank of duke in her own right. 


Marquess/Margrave


A marquess (pronounced “mar-kwiss”), marquis in French, Markgraf in German, is the governor of a border country, known as a “march,” (“marche” in French, “Mark” in German) or marquessate or margraviate, just as a count is the governor of a county. The medieval term was margrave. ,A marquess/margrave outranks a count because a border county is more essential to the defence of a kingdom, and a marquess was therefore likely to be wealthier and have more troops at his disposal. “Mark” appears in the name of the country of Denmark (Danish: Danmark) as well as in Norway’s border county with Finland, “Finnmark” and in the county (not a border county this time) Telemark, also in Norway.  Italian: marchese, Spanish: marqués, Portuguese: marquês


Marquess is also the term used to translate Turkish “uç beyi ”, Persian “marzban” as well as the nobility of several East Asian countries. [side note: the origin of the word for the almond treat “marzipan” is highly contested. Some claim it originates from the Persian “marzban.” Only the great Spaghetti Monster knows why.]


Margravine/Marchioness


The wife or widow of a margrave/marquess.


Earl/Count


Earl” is English, and the Old English eorl is cognate with the Scandinavian jarl, which is usually translated “chieftain.” The continental equivalent is count. An earl, or count, ranks below a marquess and above a viscount.  Hughes, Geoffrey (26 March 1998), in Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, Penguin Books, puts forth the explanation that when the Normans invaded in 1066 and brought the French language with them, the Anglo-Saxons decided to stick with the Germanic term eorl because the French term count was phonetically too close to the word cunt.


An “earldom” can be either the rank or title of an earl, or the territory under his governance, although the title eventually became disassociated with territory.

 

Countess


The wife or widow of a count or an earl. There is no female match for earl. Countesses become countesses by marrying a count/earl, although in Scotland, the title can be inherited.


A count/earl or a countess is addressed as “Your Excellency.”


Viscount


Pronounced “vigh-count,” i.e., the ‘s’ is not pronounced.  The next rank down from Count, a “vice-count” is a non-hereditary position. A “shire” was the Anglo-Saxon designation equivalent to the Norman “county,” and the Anglo-Saxon “shire-reev” (from which the word “sheriff” is derived) is more or less equivalent to the French “vicomte.”  The office is known as a “viscountcy.” There are currently about 270 viscountcies in Britain today.


The title is often conferred upon the children of counts/earls as a “courtesy title.” The children of a viscount are known as The Honourable [Forename] [Surname], with the exception of the eldest child of a Scottish viscount, whose eldest child may be styled as "The Honourable Master of [X]".


A viscount in Portugal is a visconde and in Spain, a vizconde. In Germanic languages (and others in Eastern Europe) there is another rank considered on par with viscount, that of a “burgrave” (German: Burggraf, i.e., “castle count”) Swedish burggrefve, then burggreve; Polish: burgrabia; Czech: purkrabi (an office abolished in 1848). The territory he ruled over was known as a burgraviate - German Burggrafschaft, Latin praefectura.


Viscountess/Burgravine (German Burggräfin)


The wife or widow of a viscount, or a holder of that title in her own right.


Advocatus


In France, but not in Britain, an advocatus ranked between the rank of compte/vicomte, governor (and his assistant)  of a county and a baron, governor of a barony. Equivalents existed in Germany (Vogt), the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, and Romania. Origin of the word in most European languages for “lawyer.”


Baron


The fifth, and lowest ranked member of the British peerage, after duke, marquess, earl, and viscount. A title limited to primogeniture (inherited by the firstborn son only) in Britain, but passed on to all sons in the rest of Europe.


Also “Freiherr” in German, friherre in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, vapaaherra in Finnish. Titles are still used in some circles socially, but the nobility has been disbanded officially and their descendants have no status or effect in law.


The title of a baron is a barony. When imported from France after the Norman invasion, not originally a noble rank, but merely used to identify those in service to the king. By the 20th century, when Britain introduced the notion of “non-hereditary life peers,” barons were members of the peerage, and addressed as “Noble Lord.”


Baroness


The female equivalent of a baron.


Knight


Originally a warrior of distinction on a horse, hence the association with terms such chivalry, cavalier (and in other European languages: caballero, chevalier, Ritter, Ridder).Today, a title of distinction conferred by a monarch for notable achievement. A title of merit, in other words, and not inherited or heritable. A knighted person is addressed as “Sir” or “Dame” plus given name, or full name (and not as “sir/dame” plus family name only.) The status is known as a knighthood/damehood.



Dame


The female equivalent of a knight.


Baronet


A baronet is a modern title, invented as a money-generating device, and the title is normally purchased. Baronets (the status is known as a baronetcy) are legally commoners in Britain, and not entitled to sit in the House of Lords.


The title of baronet, it turns out, is not the only title that can be purchased. Check out this possibility, if you’re the type to boast about your degree from the University of Phoenix or Liberty University or Trump University and if you don’t mind being laughed out of town by real nobles.



Baronetess


There are four baronetcies held by women in their own right. Otherwise a baronetess is the wife of a baronet.


Lord/Lady


General non-rank-specific title given to persons in Britain of “high birth”:  earls, marquesses, viscounts, barons and baroness and the younger sons of a duke, and their female equivalents, as well as other persons of authority such as judges. 


France


France has as many noble titles today as it did at the time of the French Revolution, about 4000 so-called “noble families,” and between 50,000 and 100,000 so-called “nobles,” although as in other democratic countries, they have no legal status. They are allowed to carry on as if their rank mattered to the common person and not just to snobs and other social climbers.


France once had a number of titles down at the bottom, in the categories below baron, sometimes referred to as “gentry” or as “petty nobility.” Those include:


Chevalier: an otherwise untitled nobleman who belonged to an order of chivalry

Écuyer: "Squire" and literally: "shield bearer"): lowest specific rank in the nobility, to which the vast majority of untitled nobles were entitled; also called valet or noble homme in certain regions.

Gentilhomme: lowest non-specific rank indicating nobility.

Seigneur ("Lord of the manor" and literally: "lord"): term for the untitled owner of a feudal property; strictly, neither a title nor a rank, it indicated that a landlord's property had certain noble rights attached, although properly it did not indicate the owner was noble, especially after the 17th century.

And last, and most assuredly least,

Bâtard: recognized bastard son of a gentleman or nobleman. A bastard could not usually inherit a title (if any claimants of legitimate birth existed) but could be employed in their father's retinue. 

 


Others

Europe’s iron curtain countries abolished all titles of nobility starting with the October Revolution, and many countries have followed suit: Mexico, Greece and Austria have abolished both the conferral of titles and their use as well. Other countries, such as Germany and Italy still allow one to inherit titles, but they give those with them no special legal status. Finland and Norway, too, allow you to keep your title, but without any attached privileges. France has a law


Germany has you incorporate your title into your family name. Finland, Norway and t


Various republics, including former Iron Curtain countries, Greece, Mexico, and Austria have expressly abolished the conferral and use of titles of nobility for their citizens. This is distinct from countries which have not abolished the right to inherit titles, but which do not grant legal recognition or protection to them, such as Germany and Italy, although Germany recognizes their use as part of the legal surname. Still other countries and authorities allow their use, but forbid attachment of any privilege to go along with it.

In the United States, establishment of a nobility is prohibited by the Title of Nobility Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

 

Japan

When the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Japan since 1600, was overthrown in 1868 and the Emperor Meiji was restored to the throne, the old nobility, the Kuge (公家), was restored as well and merged with the daimyo (大名), the feudal lords, to create a new aristocracy consisting of 427 families. They were replaced in 1869 by a Japanese peerage, known as the kazoku (華族), which remained in place until the 1947 Constitution of Japan abolished the kazoku and ended the use of all titles of nobility or rank outside the immediate Imperial Family. 

Under the Peerage Act of 7 July 1884, pushed through by Home Minister and future first Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi after visiting Europe, the Meiji government expanded the hereditary peerage with the award of kazoku status to persons regarded as having performed distinguished public services to the nation. The government also divided the kazoku into five ranks explicitly based on the British peerage, but with titles deriving from the ancient Chinese nobility:

Those ranks were:

Prince, the equivalent of a Duke (公爵, kōshaku)

Marquess (侯爵, kōshaku)

Count, the equivalent of an Earl (伯爵, hakushaku)

Viscount (子爵, shishaku), and

Baron (男爵, danshaku).

 

Although the titles are no longer, many descendants of the kazoku families continue to occupy prominent roles in Japanese society and industry to the present day, without any special legal status.

 

Korea

Korea too had a traditional monarchy and an accompanying aristocracy until the time of the Japanese Occupation, which ran from 1910 until the defeat of the Japanese in World War II in 1945. South Korean independence enabled the installation of a Constitution that adopted a republic system in which the concept of nobility was abolished, both formally and in practice.

 

China

The Republican Revolution of 1911 ended the official imperial system that had existed for centuries in China. Although some noble families maintained their titles and social status for a time, the wars and the political and economic upheavals, and particularly the introduction of a communist ideology forced their decline. Today, the nobility as a class has virtually disappeared.

 

 References include, but are not limited to,  the following:


https://nobilitytitles.net/nobility-articles/the-hierarchy-of-european-nobility.html


https://www.nobility-association.com/royalandnobleranks.htm?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=0d6c1002b567ca2c18f64cda9388bf8084481ae1-1605911818-0-AamX7Zz-slhjAs2yxTFWgCABUoig-a5u6ImFrwcsw2bvnG5lfMxYeLywaEVMecCGlXP8QTKIjcUOpFI9aJj1edq3OpFtKwiaVOwHrSKByH052onf4wChbFA5NV1g9uSynlwLNGcuHg6BIdvFzaQSUvseWdrt6MwCecIEhiODTh80p6ZqCKFGWs4yZkxtX5h8zYTJHyZWW8zAwEWNutsxNygQecBSTbOaO3b5WeyBqGthA1RQoy7-jjNNkn0k5zL1pSUyc-8Or_Z0rQ4pt7mtPxppqEYfD3QZnWoncFQ0l8lDjPuKKp7vFC5pHEmOfG48OjWeGrhRPROmfQ5rfPhyUXg


http://www.lysator.liu.se/nordic/mirror2/titlefaq.htm