Bricolage 6; Or, Vacationing in August Like I'm a Psychiatrist or an Italian
With Lots of Bonus Bircolage, Including a Lot About Barbenheimer and Other Historical Events
1. Gone Fishin’
Attempts is taking August off.
This was not, I admit, my original plan: I had (somewhat hazily) intended to simply go full-out until I ran out of steam. That is not what has happened: I still have plenty of steam, and plenty of miracluously-climate-friendly-since-its-magical-being-as-it-is-just-a-metaphor coal to make more. Rather, I have had some issues in my personal life which has led me to falling behind, and I need time to catch up in other domains. Rather than let a week or two slip here or there, I have decided that August is vacation month, as it famously is for psychiatrists and, as I understand, Italians.1 That this year August happens to have five Thursdays and not four, and that my month-long vacation will therefore be an extra week longer, is, I must admit, a feature not a bug.
I should emphasize that I am taking August off only from Attempts; Retcon, which as-you-really-ought-to-know-by-now-have-I-not-repeated-this-enough-times is a mosaic story, comprising a series of short stories published once per month, is continuing on schedule. (Indeed, it is largely to ensure that it doesn’t lag that I have decided to take August off over here.) So the sixth story, “Unless Another Escape to Tell Thee”, will come out on August 9 as scheduled. And the seventh story will come out on time on September 9. But I won’t be posting at Attempts in August, except that I plan to make a one-time exception to both that and to my rule of alternating more substantive essays with lighter fare2 in order to send out a story reminder on August 9 when the newest Retcon comes out.
Otherwise, I will be back with a real essay on Thursday, September 7. In the meantime, enjoy one last bricolage before I go.
2. Attempts’s Archives: Now With Tags!
While I’m on vacation is a good time to check out the archives and see what you’ve missed: counting this bricolage, I have posted 26 times over the last half year. You might have missed one; better go check!
To facilitate this process, I have gone ahead and added tags to all the posts on Attempts. The main essays, which I consider to be the heart of the project, are all tagged essays (this link is also now in the main navigation bar). I’ve also subdivded the essays into (very rough) subject categories; these can be found on the new tags page (lkewisee in the main navigation bar). The off-week posts don’t have a single tag, but are categorized by type (bricolage, meta, retcon, whimsy). Again, these are all on the new tags page for easier archive exploring.
Personally, I recommend checking out the essays and making sure you didn’t miss any, and then, if you have more browsing time on your hands, going through the other pieces.
3. The Fall of Rome (and the Continuity of Debate Upon It)
This past June there was a brief flair up among the substackeratti about the fall of Rome, in particular whether or not it ever happened.
To non-historians, this question might seem absurd: of course Rome fell! It’s like asking if World War Two happened. But the fall of Rome has been questioned since the year of my birth (Peter Brown’s seminal The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 came out in 1971). The argument is, to nutshell it, that rather than a decisive fall, there was instead a complex cultural change that was best seen as the normal sort of change-with-continuity that occurs throughout human history. There were a lot of changes in the Roman Empire between its founding and 476 C.E. (or 410, or whatever date you want to pick), and we see those as normal history! Maybe the changes that have been thought of as a fall are just more of the same, with perhaps a slightly stronger focus on changing political strucutres.
It’s hard to discuss this without delving into the historiography, because there are a lot of disagreements here and rich arguments on both sides. I have my sympathies—I am in the “Rome fell” camp, and have a strong suspicion of the other side as a product of I-wish-it-were-a-strawman cultural relativism of the “illiteracy is just as good as literacy” variety3—and I have to presume it’s at least partially tribalism that makes me see the faults in the other side more strongly.4 But this is a case where disciplinary subjects matter: people are often looking at different things and answering different questions using different tools. A good look at this subject will take both sides seriously, contextualize the arguments in the historiography, and notice when people are reacting to caricatures and popular myths rather than actual scholarly arguments.
Fortunately, just at the moment I was thinking I really don’t have time to get into this, I saw, via one of the participants in the recent contretemps—a long series of three posts by Bret Devereaux (one, two, three) that covers the issue very well,5 taking the attitude that “this is an argument where I think both of the two major ‘sides’ – our two knights, ‘change and continuity’ and ‘decline and fall’ – make good points and that the reality is a blend of their views.” His conclusions—and you really should read the long version if you’re at all interested, are that in cultural matters, there is strong continuity—
Latin persisted; Christianity persisted; Roman literature persisted; Roman law persisted; the Roman Empire itself persisted in the East. The claims of Frankish and Gothic kings to be heirs to the legacy of Rome was not an empty one from a cultural standpoint – if Gallo-Romans or Greek-speaking Eastern Romans could be heirs of Rome, why not Latin-speaking Franko-Romans?
On the other hand, in terms of state structure, the issue is far more mixed: the new, smaller states were in many ways patterned after Rome, but
…the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West represented a substantial decline in state capacity, borne out by smaller churches, fewer public buildings, smaller armies, and smaller, less centralized, more fragmented polities and a greater degree of endemic warfare (although those wars were often on a smaller scale). Resource mobilizations that were casual accomplishments for the Romans – the construction of the infrastructure of Roman cities essentially ex nihilo through much of Gaul and Spain – would be flatly out of reach for western European states until the High Middle Ages.
And in terms of economic development, urban centers, population, and standard of living, the fall of Rome was not only real but catastrophic:
…the collapse of Roman connectedness took a slow economic decline and turned it into a collapse. As I’ve said, what you see here depends on where you look and what you think is the most important; for me – as I’ve noted before – my focus is drawn to the living conditions of the people in a society. From that perspective, the fall of Rome was an unmitigated disaster, a clear (but not total) break with the economic patterns of antiquity which had enabled a measure of prosperity in the Mediterranean world. The world that emerged in the sixth century was one that was substantially poorer, its population brought back in line with its reduced production by decades of grinding misery and shortage.
Two other important points Devereaux makes are, first, that while the ancient Roman economy was stronger than “change-and-continuity” scholars tend to think, and thus the decline was very real (and negative not just for elites but for the masses of people too), it wasn’t some great engine about to take off and industrialize, but rather “a delicate clockwork mechanism which could, for a time, haul itself modestly – and only modestly – above pre-modern agrarian norms. When the gears broke, the clockwork stopped and it fell back down.” Secondly, Devereaux also stresses this point:
…the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West – while it was a catastrophe for those people living at the time – was less a product of ‘hordes of barbarians’ coming over the frontier (who again, were mostly invited in by Roman leaders looking for advantage in their endless struggles with each other) and instead a product of actors within the political system, within the empire, tearing it apart out of the pursuit of their own interests, deceived by the assumption that something so old could never simply vanish…until it did. The consequences of their decisions and of their failure to recognize the fragility of the clockwork machine that suspended them above the poverty to come (and that it was already damaged) were great and terrible.
…Which he then explains with a fabulous, paragraph-long metaphor, but I shan’t quote that here, since you really should go read it in its full context, particularly if you’ve never heard anyone doubting the fall of Rome before and think that the idea that the empire never ended sounds like the raving of a madman,6 or if you’ve heard about the scholarly (and substackarly) debates want a nuanced take on the issue.
As a final aside, I should say that rest of Devereaux’s blog looks interesting too, but I haven’t read any more than the three Fall of Rome posts yet. And while I am recommending sources about the fall of Rome, I also want to recommend this podcast on the fall of Rome by Patrick Wyman.
4. Barbenheimer: Three Notes and a Link Round-Up
This past weekend was, of course, Barbenheimer,7 the simultaneous release of two facially very different movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer. For what it’s worth, I myself saw Oppenheimer this past weekend; I enjoyed it, thought it was very well done, and would recommend it. But of course it was the conjunction of the two films’ release that made it an event. Attempts 2.0 has, for the most part, tried to stay away from story-of-the-moment links and discussion, but this is more of a guideline than an actual rule,8 and I can’t help adducing a bit of briccolage relevant to the cultural event of the moment, most of which speak to more than the moment: one about the deep similarity in the topics of the two seemingly-distinct movies, one about the translations of the famous Gita quote used by Oppenheimer (and in Oppenheimer), and one about the historical accuracy of that film.
4a. The similarity of the movies:
What gave rise to this little bit of memetic fluff was, of course, the difference between the two movies: cheerful and pink and fantasy and about toys, versus grim and noir and historical and about war. But this essay in the Washington Post by environmental studies professor Tyler Austin Harper9 argues that they are, in fact, closely linked:
The underlying premise of all the jokes — that these films come out on the same day but are about hilariously different subjects and have wildly different tones — is misguided. The two movies actually have a fundamental, and disturbing, common ground. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind our nuclear age, and Barbie — a toy that takes more than three cups of oil to produce before it lingers in landfills around the world — both tell the story of the dawn of our imperiled era. “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” each offer a window into the creation of the Anthropocene…
The widespread introductions of plutonium and plastic into the geological record are deeply intertwined…. [The Anthropocene is] a reality in a world where humanity has baked its worst vices into the Earth’s geological record. Despite their apparent differences, both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” tell the story of core ideas of the 20th century: accelerating militarism and unbounded consumption, ideas that might well outlive our species in the form of plastic and plutonium’s lingering traces across our fragile planet.
Read the rest for more, including the striking fact that DuPont, which made plutonium in the 1940s, made the plastic for Barbie dolls in the 1950s.
OPPENHEIMER AND BARBIE Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in plastic. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if the end will not come quick I think I see perhaps the fate Of the ocean's plastic Still lies in wait And'll do the trick. — Apologies to Robert Frost (and the reader)
4b. Now I am become… what, exactly?
On a topic limited to the -enheimer half of the cultural event, the blogger Waggish lists some of the hundreds of translations of Bhagavad Gita 11.32, which Oppenheimer famously said he thought of after witnessing the first atomic bomb’s explosion:
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds'. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
But Waggish notes that the key word in the passage, kala (काल), which Oppenheimer translated as “death”, can mean several other things too, notably “time”—and that “time” is, in fact, used in a majority of the translations. For example, one recent translation (by Eknath Easwaran, in 2000) reads
I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world. Even without your participation, all the warriors gathered here will die.
Which is, at least to my monoglot, largely-ignorant-of-Hinduism ears, an extremely different thought than that in the translation which Oppenheimer’s citation made famous. Oppenheimer’s cited translation made it sound like Vishnu was threatening the Prince, trying to scare him into doing his duty; in Easwaran’s translation (and, indeed, many of the others Waggish collects) it sounds like he is rather saying that time will destroy all the warriors anyway, and so the Prince might as well go into battle and kill them, which I gather is the end that Vishnu is trying to achieve. It casts the entire passage in a very different light—and makes me want to read the Gita (in a modern translation).
4c. A note on the historical accuracy of Oppenheimer
Also related strictly to the Oppenheimer half of the cultural event, I wanted to note (and here there will be spoilers, insofar as there can be “spoilers” for a movie based closely on real history) that Oppenheimer was, as far as I can tell from my memory of reading the biography it is based on,10 historically accurate: many of the events in the film are directly from the book.
This is not to deny there are the type of distortions common in such works, largely the sort of simplifications necessary to turn a book of more than 700 pages into even a long movie. An example: one scene from the movie has Oppenheimer tell Einstein, in a response to the suggestion that he could move oversees after his shabby treatment by the U. S. Government, “Damn it, I happen to love this country”. In reality, this exchange was between Oppenheimer and diplomat George Kennan, the latter of whom quoted it in the eulogy he gave at Oppenheimer’s funeral (Bird & Sherwin, p. 5). But of course Einstein was (for good reasons) a character in the film, and Kennan wasn’t, and it made perfect dramatic sense to take this line and ascribe it to a dialogue with a different person than it really occurred with. This is the sort of distortion historical fiction inevitably makes: if you want more accuracy than that, read the book.
But the big distortion—which is at least arguably also justifiable for dramatic reasons, although it’s a much bigger distortion—is in the scene that provides the drama for the final act of the film: the nomination hearing of Lewis Strauss (one of Oppenheimer’s chief political enemies) to be the Secretary of Commerce, which was derailed by how he had treated Oppenheimer.
The biography, naturally, spends a lot of time on Oppenheimer’s I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-a-trial over his security clearance, which is consistent (if memory serves) with what is portrayed in the film. But the movie (quite cleverly) pairs this with a very dramatic showdown regarding Strauss’s later nomination. This I didn’t remember from the book—to the point of my wondering whether, perhaps, I hadn’t actually finished it. But I had; it was just too minor a point to linger in memory (whereas it is central to the experience of the movie). Here is the paragraph that tells that part of the story, its only mention in the book:
Strauss’ enmity toward Oppenheimer had only deepened since the 1954 trial. And then all the old wounds had been reopened in 1959, when President Eisenhower nominated Strauss as his commerce secretary. In the bitter confirmation battle, in which the Oppenheimer hearing was a central factor, Strauss narrowly lost, by a vote of 49–46. Strauss correctly blamed Senator Clinton Anderson, and then Senator John F. Kennedy—who had been lobbied by Oppenheimer defenders like McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. When Kennedy protested, “It would require an extreme case to vote against the president,” Mac Bundy responded, “Well, this is an extreme case.” Bundy laid out for Kennedy Strauss’ reprehensible conduct in the Oppenheimer case. Convinced, Kennedy switched his vote and Strauss lost the confirmation. “It’s a lovely show—never thought I’d live to see my revenge,” cabled Bernice Brode to Oppie. “In unchristianly spirit, enjoy every squirm and anguish of victim. Having wonderful time—wish you were here!” Even seven years later, Strauss thought he saw Oppenheimer’s influence at work, complaining that “Oppenheimer’s partisans are continuing their reprisals against individuals who did their duty.” The case would follow both Strauss and Oppenheimer to their graves. (p. 577)
This is not the dramatic show-piece shown in the movie. It’s consistent with it: the Strauss’s treatment of Oppenheimer is the cause and switched some votes; Kennedy is mentioned explicitly in the film. But the dramatic, surprise testamony near the end of the film is, as far as the evidence of Bird and Sherwin’s book goes, entirely invented. (I can’t rule out that it’s based on something from another source.) Sure, the spirit of the thing—that Leo Strauss’s “reprehensible conduct in the Oppenheimer case” resulted in his being denied the positiion—is true enough. But it was a lot subtler than the movie: it takes place in private conversations, and with people long known to be on Oppenheimer’s side, who managed to quietly influence enough votes. In the movie it’s a big, surprising, public showdown.
Ultimately this, too, strikes me as a justifiable departure from the facts: a historical drama needs its drama, after all, and this allows the film to have a reasonable dramatic arc. But it’s worth noting that one can read the book and not remember Strauss’s failed nomination: it’s simply not that big a point in what is, after all, the story of Oppenheimer’s life, not Strauss’s. But in the end I have to say it was a very clever way for Nolan to dramatize the shifting perception of Oppenheimer and the historical memory of how his (remember-this-is-not-a) trial changed over time, and to do so in a way that was true to the spirit of what happened if not to the precise way in which it happened, so I think he was right to do it, even at the cost of some significant invention.
4d. &c.
And a few miscellaneous, Barbenehimer-related—well, mostly Oppenheimer related—links:
The Atlantic interviews Richard Rhodes, who wrote the most influential book about The Making of the Atomic Bomb, about the film Oppenheimer; he says “it’s really first-class work”, and then, more nuanced, adds: “One time I asked [the physicist] Bob Serber if my portrait of Oppenheimer was anywhere close to the real human being. And Serber, who had a very dry wit, said, ‘It’s the least wrong of all those I’ve seen.’ And I think that applies here”. Rhodes also has some notes about how minor things in one history can be made into the center of another, talking about the point I made above in 4c (the marginality of the Strauss hearing in the book versus its centrality to the film), noting he found the end to the first third of his book in another historian’s footnote. Such is the craft!
Adam Kotsko uses the occasion of the response to Oppenheimer to decry the moralism of responses to art in today’s culture, left and right: “Nothing anyone is saying is wrong, it’s just not interesting. It’s not addressing what people make movies for or why people want to see movies. The logical end goal seems to be to create artwork that is straightforward political propaganda, and we’ve seen how that turned out for the evangelicals (and indeed, for the Stalinists).“
Matt Yglesias imagines an alternate history where WW2 doesn’t happen and nuclear power is thought of primarily as a form of energy, not a type of weapon, and points out how it would have helped the development of nuclear power, the opposition to which is (in hindsight) a move with terrible reprocussions for the environment, far more terrible than its pursuit would have been (see Change, Climate).
Missed opportunity: the one time Heisenberg was shown in the film he was relatively young, so the ages wouldn’t work, but it would have been worth a break from realism to get in the superb meta-joke that casting Bryan Cranston in the role would have been.
Not to make this a purely Oppenheimer link list, here is David Auerbach on the film’s marketing: “I won’t say that the Barbie movie is actually irrelevant to its cultural impact and economic success, but the content of the movie is considerably more marginal than it is with most movies, even Marvel Universe epics.“
Auerbach also links to this review of the movie, which I can’t really judge since I haven’t seen the film, but which is a nice little piece of writing in its own right: “Barbie, and all Barbie associated products alone are going to make a lot of money for Mattel. Obviously. But the fact that they achieved this feat of business BY telling people that all they care about is money is both commendable and somewhat depressing.“
Finally, the conjunction of two movies both of which are, at least so far, one-shots (one can’t say that neither are franchise movies, since media franchises often begin with toys so Barbie definitely counts), has given some people hope that the endless parade of superhero movies and other franchise fodder will be beaten back, and that we can once again have some movies that are just movies, not pieces of a marketing scheme. I am skeptical—I believe that Barbie did much better than Oppenheimer, and I have to assume that there will be a sequel to it eventually given how well it’s doing; Oppenheimer, which is more of a genuine one-shot, is less of a blockbuster. But speaking as a superhero fan (and one who also recently saw Across the Spider-Verse and really enjoyed it, too), I hope it’s true. We desperately need more genre and format diversity in our big-release movies. And if (as it seems) even this pseudo, media-hype event has driven more people to go to the movies (I will admit it drove me!), this is, I think, a good thing for the culture at large.
5.
And some links to good reading of diverse varieties:
Cat Pierro’s “Pitches for Poems”. This is a delightful little bit of fiction which reminded me of Stanislaw Lem at his most Borgesian, told in the style of Gene Wolfe’s “From The Desk Of Gilmer C. Merton“. Full disclosure: Cat is a friend(ly acquaintance), so take this recommendation with as much salt as you think that necessitates.
One of my favorite writers, Samuel R. Delany (whom I’ve met a number of times and who is marvelous and charming and kind) was profiled in the New Yorker.
Philosopher John Holbo11 has been writing, and illustrating, a version of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra rewritten as a Dr. Seuss book. Beautiful, bizarre, and totally insane—just like Nieztsche! (And, come to think of it, Seuss. Hmmm…. I think I see where he’s coming from.)
I said above that I hadn’t read any of Bret Devereaux’s blog aside from his posts on the fall of Rome, but of course these bricolage posts are built hodge-podge over time, so by the time we get down here I can recommend his posts on the historical (in)accuracy of The Game of Thrones.
And that’s all for now. I’ll see you in September.
My apologies for perpetuating false stereotypes if this turns out not to be true.
Which, in fact, I have already broken, once by having lighter fare back to back, and more than once in the other direction, having on a few occasions done substantive essays in back-to-back weeks. But then—
Sadly, this is not an exaggeration.
But seriously, dismissing a thoughtful and interesting scholar as an “econbro” without even linking to his work, and making high-quality counterarguments like “It transformed and we’re correct” tends to make your side look wrong rather than right.
With, I hasten to add, far more knowledge of the subject than I could have brought to bear.
And maybe he was! He himself certainly considered that possibility among others. But he was also a genius and a brilliant writer and don’t you forget it.
And how much does it sum up the cultural moment that there is a Wikipedia page for this…. what even is it? An event? Meme? Marketing ploy?
cf note 2, above.
What is a professor of environmental science? A professor of physics is a physicist; a professor of philosophy a philosopher; a professor of history is a historian. But a professor of enviornmental science is a… what? This is not, of course, unique to that field; what is a professor of English litertature? And a professor of business is usually not a businessman (at least while being a professor), nor a professor of administration an administrator. There is a larger point to be made here, I think, but I shall leave it for another occasion.
American Prometheus: : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Random House, 2005). Sherwin was a professor at Tufts when I was a student there, and I knew him slightly (he co-taught a course I took). I can also recommend his other book, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies.
Internet denizens might remember him as a blogger at Crooked Timber, or for the blog he co-hosted with his wife Belle, where he published one of the great blog posts of all time (officially!), which isn’t in the above evergreens list because I already linked it from Attempts 2.0.