Misunderstandings, Controversies, Versions of History

In 1415, the Czech priest and and professor John Huss was tried, condemned and executed, burned at the stake, at the Council of Constance.

A little over a century later, in 1521, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, appeared before the young Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms. Luther reminded some people of Huss. Luther himself said that he agreed with some aspects of Huss' teachings. Some people assumed that Luther would be condemned and executed as Huss had been, and were surprised when, after Luther has stood trial before him, Charles allowed Luther to leave the council under the same safe conduct which had protected him on his way there.

 

And ever since, people have wondered why Charles let Luther go. Perhaps Charles, and/or his advisors, were thinking of the situation in Prague and the surrounding Czech territory: Huss had been executed, but the Hussite church was very much alive. Perhaps Charles wondered whether Huss might have had less influence if he had been tolerated, ignored, treated as a well-meaning simpleton. 

I don't know why Luther was let go. Already in 1521 he was very popular, and the Lutheran church kept growing at an enormous pace. And, it seems to me, Luther was misunderstood from the start and is still misunderstood. For example, German peasants revolted in 1524 and 1525, and even a few nobles joined them. And these people in revolt called themselves Lutherans. As have many others to this day, they seem to have equated existing orders, and conservatism, with the Catholic Church, and Lutherism with all and any sort of protest or resistance to existing orders.  "Protest --" it makes up the first two syllables of the word "Protestant."

Luther did not sympathize with the revolts. He wrote and published a tract in which he advised the nobles to crush the rebellion thoroughly, to torture and kill the rebels. And indeed, they did exactly that. 

Would the powers that were have treated the rebels any differently if Luther had not said or written a word about the rebellion? I don't know. I tend to doubt it. I tend to doubt that this was one of Luther's most widely-read published works. Because people have not ceased to associate Catholicism with conservatism and Lutheranism with rebellion. Especially in Germany. Those who live in other parts of the world, and may be familiar with conservative Lutherans and Leftist Catholics, might be astonished, for example, to read, as I did, Schiller's history of the Dutch Revolution, where every imaginable sort of tyranny is associated with Catholicism, and every noble spirit of freedom with Protestantism, which in Germany meant Lutheranism. Except in painting and sculpture, where, Schiller said, it was all exactly reversed.

Schiller was an ignorant dingbat.

After the Diet of Worms, religious wars between Catholics and Protestants began, and did not cease for centuries. Luther condemned Lutheran peasants and championed Lutheran rulers, kings and dukes and counts. 

Decades after Luther had passed away, in 1576, a 24-year-old Habsburg king and archduke became the Emperor Rudolf II, and ruled until 1612. I wonder what Luther would've thought of Rudolph. Like every other Habsburg ruler before and after him, Rudolph was Catholic. Unlike many other Habsburgs, Rudolf did not dislike, distrust or disapprove of non-Catholics. His court in Prague became a center of artistic and intellectual activity. He valued individuals according to the abilities, their talents; if he cared at all about their religious beliefs, he gave little sign of it. 

A widespread belief about Rudolph at the time was that he was insane, and a very weak ruler, who did little to halt the gathering storm of religious conflict which exploded six years after his death at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. This view also tended to dominate among historians, until just a few decades ago. Now, it seems, an entirely different view of Rudolph is the mainstream, that of a wise and tolerant ruler far ahead of his time, who did nothing at all to fan flames of war, and whom many of his contemporaries feared simply because he was far ahead of his time in his habits and thought. Not a lunatic, but an enlightened monarch a couple of centuries before the Enlightenment. 

Who's right about Rudolph? Who's wrong? Or is everyone perhaps partly right and partly wrong? I don't know. 

Around 1600, Ferdinand's court, widely thought of at the time as a madhouse, was visited by an orphaned teenage Czech noble who would also go on to divide opinion -- Albrecht von Wallenstein. Raised a Hussite, Wallenstein converted to Catholicism and served the Habsburgs as a military leader,  and later also as a financier, until his death in 1634. 

Or did he? This is the most controversial point. The conventional view, challenged by Golo Mann's biography of Wallenstein published in 1971, is that, in the last couple of years of his life, he began to conspire against the Emperor, while pretending to still be his loyal Generalissimo. Having been born a baron and risen, through his extraordinary talent as a military leader and statesman, to count, then marquise, then duke, he was accused of wanting to rise, at the Emperor's expense, still higher -- and the only ranks in 17th-century Europe higher than duke were king and -- Emperor.

Mann and others maintain that there simply is no serious evidence that Wallenstein was unloyal to the Habsburgs, and that his rising power was inconvenient to certain thoroughly dishonest and ruthless politicians, who turned the mind of the Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-1637) against one of his best helpers. 

Who's right? I don't know.

Rafael Landivar and his Epic Poem Rusticatio Mexicana

Rafael Landivar was born in Guatemala in 1731, entered the Jesuit order and went to Mexico to study in 1750, and was ordained and returned to Guatemala in 1755. There he taught rhetoric and grammar until 1767, when upon the order of King Charles III of Spain, all Jesuits were expelled from the Western Hemisphere. After several years of wandering and hardship, Landivar found a home in Bologna among a group of exiled Jesuits in 1770. He remained in Italy until his death in 1793.

 

He is remembered above all for his poem Rusticatio Mexicana, first published in Modena in 1781. The poem deals with both Mexico and Guatemala; however, in Europe at the time few people had heard of Guatemala, and the term "Mexico" was often used to refer to a territory including Guatemala and much else of Central and South America.

Rusticatio Mexicana is often compared to Vergil's Georgics. Although both poems deal with rural life, the comparison is problematic. Landivar's poem is much longer than Vergil's. It deals with a much greater range of subjects. And while the Georgics harken back nostalgically to an imagined Roman Golden Age in an attempt to inspire Vergil's contemporaries to greater morality and better citizenship, the Rusticatio Mexicana celebrates the wonders of Guatemala and Mexicana in Landivar's own time.

And while Landivar certainly acknowledges following in Vergil footsteps, there are actually more homages to the Aeneid in his epic than to the Georgics, as well as references to many other authors, ancient, Renaissance and also contemporary with Landivar, including several of his Jesuit colleagues. These many references are the appreciative comments of a very well-read author, not the copying of an unimaginative hack.

Landivar is deservedly well-known in present-day Latin America, -- where, for example, a large university in Guatemala is named after him, and many editions of the Rusticatio Mexicana have appeared -- and undeservedly obscure elsewhere.

In writing this post I have referred to Andrew Laird's volume The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landivar and the Rusticatio Mexicana. In addition to the text of Rusticatio Mexicana alongside an English translation, the volume texts and translations of several shorter poems by Landivar, several very illuminating essays about the poem, the author and Latin American literature written in Latin.

In my opinion, Laird's volume has only one serious flaw. Sadly, it is a major flow, and utterly inexplicable: the text of the Rusticatio Mexicana and its English translation, presumably the biggest attraction of the entire work, are printed in a much smaller font than the rest of the work. The other way around would've made far more sense. 

Those who can read Spanish may prefer one of the Latin-Spanish editions. Not to mention those few and blessed who can actually read Latin with no help whatsoever from any translations.

Can Rivian Deliver?

Rivian said to their customers that they would deliver R1T's, electric pickup trucks, and R1S's, electric SUV's, to them in 2020. They missed that deadline. But they said they'd start deliveries in March 2021. March came and went and still, no customers had Rivians. Rivian said: June. Then they said: July. 

Then they said: in September, 2021, they would begin deliveries. 

In August I saw that Rivian had announced something. Was it something to do with deliveries? No, it was about some talks they'd had about selling vehicles in Europe. Then a couple of days ago I saw they had announced something. Had they actually delivered a vehicle to a customer?

 

No. They announced that customer-ready vehicles had come off of their assembly line. Not the sort of thing companies usually bother to make press releases about...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, making cars is hard. That's not the question I'm asking. I'm asking a much more specific question: can Rivian take R1T's which have already come off of the production line, and deliver them to customers who paid $1,000 for a spot in line like 4 years ago, by the end of the month? Seems like a pretty simple operation. So simple that a chimp like me could make it happen. But that's not the question either. The question is: can Rivian do it? Sure, they can get an order form Amazon for 100,000 trucks. They can get billions of dollars of capital from Ford.

I couldn't do either one of those things. But that's not the question. The question is, can the guys running Rivian pull their heads out of their asses long enough to deliver one God-damned truck to somebody who's going to pay for it, by midnight Pacific time on September 30, 2021?

I say: no. Because while they may be geniuses at lots of other things, they have proven themselves to be very, very, very bad at this one particular thing: delivering.

When you're the away team and you're holding on to a one-run lead in the bottom of the 9th with 2 men on and 2 out, and the pitcher on the mound is tired, and you look to the bullpen, you may see someone there who is brilliant at all sorts of things, and a really swell person too. But at that moment, if he's not good at delivering, all of those other really nice qualities don't seem to matter quite as much, somehow. If there's another guy in the bullpen who's a despicable human being, and really ugly, too, and has unbearable body odor, BUT, he's a closer, he's more the sort of guy you're looking for. At that moment. In that situation. Maybe not in life in general, but in that specific situation.

I don't want any of those Rivian guys anywhere near my bullpen when we're the away team and we're up by one with two out and two on in the bottom of the ninth. Why?

Because they don't deliver. What is needed, at this point, at Rivian, is somebody with a semi who will load a pickup on it and take it to a customer. This specific thing, at this moment, for Rivian, is important. And I'm saying they wouldn't recognize that guy if God Almighty Himself pointed down  at him from Heaven and said in an Earth-shaking voice, "That's your guy. Him. Right there." Nope. Rivian is going to be much too busy with another press release about plans to break ground for a factory in Berlin, to even notice our Lord God Almighty talking to them about something much more simple and prosaic and boring, but also more important, AT THIS MOMENT.

 

I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

Dream Log: Bicycle Racer in Japan

I dreamed I was in Japan post-WWII, when MacArthur's troops were occupying the country. But I was not an American soldier; I was a professional bicycle racer, quite a famous one. I would change from one moment to the next between being European-American, Chinese or Japanese. My appearance changed greatly, so that it would have been impossible to mistake me in one of the nationalities for me in another nationality, but I remained the same famous bicycle racer in all three. 

I had been invited by some Japanese people to visit the country. Japan was in a state of great upheaval, and some people wanted to improve the country's overall mood with interesting distractions, such as professional bicycle racing. So, depending upon your point of view, my presence in Japan could be seen as an important cultural event, or a cynical attempt to manipulate public opinions, or something in between or something else.

 

The various opinions about my presence in the country would have been obvious to me to some extent in any case, but because I kept changing from an American to a Chinese man to a Japanese man, they were unavoidable to me, because some people said very different things to me depending on my nationality. Other people treated me exactly the same whether I was American, Chinese or Japanese. These latter people were by far my favorites.

Besides traveling around from city to city, being photographed with local notables from both the Japanese population and the American military,  and standing in front of cheering crowds, I also actually competed in some bicycle races. I came to a very cold region to participate in a race on the surface of a frozen lake. 

I had never ridden on ice before, let alone racing on it. I was riding on some icy city streets, trying to get used to it, being followed around by crowds as I was during my entire time in Japan, when a local gangster approached me and told me in a very loud voice that he was very impressed by the progress I was making in such a short time in riding on ice, and that he was going to bet very heavily on me to win.

When the gangster had said his piece and left, another man said that the gangster was actually going to bet very heavily against me, and that his little speech here had just been an attempt to raise the odds in my favor. This man spoke just as loudly as the gangster had, which struck me as rather brave.

Judging Other People

I don't believe that the following contains any great original insights. On the contrary, I think most of us already know all of the this.

The problem is that, for some reason, many of us, maybe most or almost all of us, seem to constantly forget it. I don't know why that is. But it seems to me it couldn't hurt to try to remind whoever reads this of these few fairly obvious things.

According to an interview I read in the 1980's, Cormac McCarthy said, "When you stop worrying what other people think of you, you have cleared one of the major hurdles in life," or words to that effect. That has always struck me as excellent advice. I'm not sure I've actually cleared that hurdle -- I don't know whether Mr McCarthy has either -- but I strive to clear it.

According to Matthew 7:1, Jesus said, "Judge not." I first heard that one when I was a small child, and I've always thought that it too is good advice.

Let's do a thought-experiment: let's say that there are 26 people who all live on the same block of one-family houses, and let's call them A through Z. 

It may be unusual for someone to judge others by one criterium above all others -- or it may not be unusual at all.  Be that as it may, I think it will help demonstrate my point if we imagine that several of these 26 people judge others primarily by a single measure.

So: A judges the 25 others according to the cars they drive. B judges them by the state of their houses. C judges them by the state of their lawns, and their gardens if the have any, and deducts points for not having a garden. D judges them according to their level of athletic physical fitness and overall physical attractiveness. E judges them just by the hair. F judges them by their clothes and fashion sense. G, a Christian, tries very hard not to judge anyone, in accordance with the verse from Matthew quoted above. H judges them according to the watches they wear, or carry in their pockets in the case of pocket watches, and deducts huge points for neither wearing nor carrying a watch. And I through Z each hardly ever notice the other 25 at all.

The point of the thought-exercise is to demonstrate the folly of worrying what others think of you. A through Z will probably never know very much about how they are judged by their neighbors. And even if they did know, they would see that they are judged differently by different people, making it impossible to impress all of them, and pointless to even try.

If you object that people judge others by a multiplicity of criteria, then that just makes it even harder to impress them all, and even more pointless to even try. Given that you agree that the criteria for judging others varies greatly from one individual to the next. 

Which I think that any reasonable adult would agree. Although I'd try not to judge you for disagreeing.

Some Say Seiko Watches are Overpriced. I Disagree

A few years ago, some astonishingly good deals were to be had on new Seiko watches. I myself bought Seiko 5 with a canvas strap on Amazon for under $50 in 2016. It's a variation of the 5 which first went on sale in 2008. It was my first purchase of a good watch in decades, after I'd spent more several times for watches which were real pieces of garbage by comparison. This is my Seiko 5:

There are many like it but this one is mine. I noticed that it had a price tag on it which said $185. Since then I've noticed MSRP's of $195 and $225 for watches which are identical or identical except for color.

For a long time I assumed that there simply was a huge disconnect between this watch's MSRP and the reality of its marketing. The way that Invicta watches sell for 25% or so of their MSRP, making for hollow drama, repeated daily from scratch, on home-shopping TV shows.

Recently, however, I heard that there had been a huge glut of these Seiko 5's, and the gap between the MSRP's and the selling prices, and some other things, began to make more sense. Seiko had simply made much too many of them, and the only way to move them was to offer them for prices which under ordinary circumstances would have been impossible. 

The intended retail price had been much closer to the MSRP, as usual with Seiko and with most watch brands.

I had not been the only one who had bought a Seiko for an amazingly low price. A price so low that it was actually very hard to understand how it was possible. Many people bought them at those prices. Many people got used to these amazing prices, and perhaps relatively few noticed the prices on the tags, or thought much about how the low prices had come to be, or have yet to realize that they benefited from an unusual market situation.

Seiko stopped making 5's like mine a long time ago, I don't know how many years ago, but I have watched the prices going up as the word gets around that there won't be any more. They cost about twice what paid now, and the prices keep rising. 

In the meantime, Seiko announced that they would be concentrating more on higher-quality watches -- a clear indication that Seikos were going to cost more. Seiko did come right out and say: "We made too many of those old 5's, that's why they're so inexpensive. We can't afford to actually keep making them and selling them at these prices, nobody could." Instead, they started making a completely different line of 5's. Even the "5" on the dials of the watches is completely different now. And they are substantially improved technically. 

The prices tags haven't changed very much, though: Seiko 5's start at $275 now, up from $225. If you compared MSRP's it could be very easily argued that Seiko is offering more value per dollar with the new, bigger 5's with their improved movements.

But of course, people don't compare price tags. They compare what they actually paid back then to the actual prices now, which tend to be 75 to 100% of MSRP, as usual with Seiko over most of the course of its history, as usual with watches in general. And what looks to me like a return to normal pricing after a freakish market situation brought on by overproduction and a market glut, looks to many other people like greed on Seiko's part.

Rolex Watches are Ridiculously Overpriced

Rolex makes about a million watches a year. Their MSRP starts at around $6.000 a unit, unless they've raised prices lately, which is entirely possible, and goes up into 6 figures. Except that you can't get one for retail unless you get on a waiting list which is years long.

And they're all overpriced. Reasonable prices would start at around $1,500.

So. About a million purchases, every year, which can be put into 3 categories: 

1) People who think the watches are worth what they cost, and are getting ripped off, as badly as if they were buying Toyotas for Ferrari prices. Imagine people talking about how Toyotas were the greatest cars ever built, and showing off their Toyotas as the ultimate status symbol known to them. That's how absurd the Rolex situation is.

2) People who know watches, and know that Rolexes are ridiculously overpriced, but still, they like Rolexes, and they actually have enough money that the price doesn't matter to them.

3) People who don't know or care about watches, and who also don't know what a bubble is, and are buying Rolexes as investments. They buy the watches and put them in safes or safety-deposit boxes without even taking them out of the box once to look at them. Now and then they might flip one of the watches for a ridiculous profit, but they're holding the rest, assuming that they'll make the same kind of profit on all of them. 

I don't know whether there are more people in 1) or 3). I know that 2) is a much smaller group than 1) or 3). I know that a lot of the people in 1) and 3) have made a lot of money in other bubbles: Tesla, other EV companies, cryptocurrency, etc.

I Understand

I really do. There is nothing in this great big beautiful world cuter than a baby rhino. This one

is being looked after by qualified experts at the zoo in St Louis. Apparently it likes getting its nose scratched with that thing.

I have absolutely no trouble understanding why you wanted to have a baby rhino as a pet. I want a baby rhino as a pet. I want to have it as a pet and squoozle it all of the time and scratch its nose and do whatever else it likes. 

But I know that as the baby rhino grew, things would get... awkward. I know that soon I would not be able to handle the situation. I know that eventually I would have a full-blown disaster on my hands.

I know that it's not always a good idea to do what I want to do.

Maybe you really didn't know all of this before you paid $3000 cash money to some very shady types to get your baby rhino. But as soon as you had it, all sorts of people told you everything I said. Some of them went into much greater detail about all the different kinds of trouble you were getting yourself into. 

But you didn't listen to any of them.  The few people who thought it was great that you had a baby rhino, you chose to listen to them, even though you knew they're the biggest idiots you know.

And look what happened.

Get vaccinated, dummy!