Good morning. In The New Yorker, Giles Harvey explains why the Spanish writer Javier Cercas, who once supported reparative justice for the victims of Franco’s regime, is now against them: “What started out as a legitimate campaign for reparative justice, Cercas feels, soon degenerated into a pageant of sanctimony and opportunism. The country’s 2007 Law of Historical Memory provided some support—overdue, in his opinion—for those attempting to trace the remains of family members killed by Franco. Yet Cercas was uneasy about what he considered a government usurpation of free intellectual inquiry. ‘History is made by historians, not politicians,’ he wrote in El País at the time. ‘A law of this kind is embarrassingly evocative of the methods of totalitarian states, which know that the best way to control the present is to control the past.’ More broadly, he believed that the sudden vogue for stories of Republican heroics—or what he called ‘toxic sentimental fodder seasoned with historical good conscience’—was giving rise to the flattering fiction that opposition to Franco had been widespread . . . With the rise of historical memory came the growing sense, especially on the left, that the pact of forgetting had been a cowardly betrayal and the transition it enabled little more than the perpetuation of Francoism by other means. For Cercas, these are the forgeries of jealousy, the carping of a later generation that has come to take the liberties of modern Spain for granted. Although he concedes that the transition was imperfect, he maintains that ‘a democracy was constructed that would have been impossible to construct if the prime objective hadn’t been that of crafting a future but—Fiat justitia et pereat mundus—making amends for the past.’”

A history of the magic hat: “A telling aspect of the magic hat, as a physical thing, is that its form is often mundane, appearing in the shape of a traveler’s or laborer’s hat, such as a cap or a simple fedora. Described as a ‘coarse felt hat’ in an English play about a wishing hat published at the turn of the seventeenth century, and in a nineteenth-century Grimm’s fairy tale as a ‘little old worn-out hat’ that ‘has strange properties,’ it is similarly defined in many stories.”

Rock and Roll ain’t never gonna die, and neither will its stars. Instead, they’ll become holograms: “Companies are making plans to put droves of departed idols on tour — reanimating a live-music industry whose biggest earners will soon be dying off.”

Churchill’s friends: “Churchill’s ‘concern for friends and for friendship always seems to hover above, or in the background, of his statecraft and in his thinking about statecraft and politics.’ Comprehensive Judgement and Absolute Selfishness ‘brings that background into focus’ and proves that “friendship plays a central role in [Churchill’s] moral vision of politics.’”

Boris Kachka named books editor at The Los Angeles Times.

Tim Rice makes the case for composer Eric Whitacre: “Ask a connoisseur of classical music which composers should be included in the American Canon, and they’re bound to toss out a few names: Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein, the other John Adams. But ask them if Eric Whitacre belongs at the top of that list, and they’ll scoff and roll their eyes. That’s because in serious circles, it’s become popular to dismiss Eric Whitacre as nothing but a hack, a pretty-boy peddler of schlock and schmaltz. Despite this reputation, Whitacre has amassed a sizable fanbase. His 2010 album, Light & Gold, became the number one classical recording in both the United States and United Kingdom just weeks after its release. He has dedicated fan accounts on Instagram. He was even profiled by Politico. People tend to explain Whitcare’s polarizing nature in one of two ways: either he’s pandering to the hoi polloi, or he’s misunderstood by all but the enlightened few. But Whitacre isn’t polarizing because he’s a genius or a sellout—he’s polarizing because he’s intensely American.”

What’s the root cause of transgenderism? Boredom, Anthony Esolen argues: “Having lost a strong sense of creation and of nature as a gift from the Creator, we reduce the natural world to a fetish-object, or to inert and meaningless stuff to be manipulated for our pleasure. That stuff includes our own bodies . . . Spenser would not be surprised by the sexual ennui that has brought us the so-called ‘open’ marriage, an emblem of a people who must be stung to arousal with the nettles of the new—which turns out to be old and weary—and the bold— which turns out to be timid and craven and self-protective. Safe sex, indeed: safe from meaning. So too with the ‘trans’ in trans-gender. It is a bridge to and from what are regarded as no-places, no-things. We may say all day long that it is biologically impossible to turn a boy into a girl. The biological impossibility does not matter, because the creatures themselves, the boy and the girl, are not acknowledged in the first place. Modern man, having denied that there is any meaning in created things, finds that his own mind falls to ruin, and he can no longer affirm any meaning in his own body, his sex. He is far from being grateful that there are such creatures as boys and girls. He is made wary and snappish by reminders of that fact. At best he retains a superficial appreciation for their peculiar forms of handsomeness. But he has been taught to acknowledge nothing more—not the far sight of the boy on the bow of the ship of life, or the deep tenderness of the girl who is made for protecting what is small and infinitely precious.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Jewish Review of Books, Diane Cole writes about Mark Twain’s visit to the Holy Land:

“Many of Twain’s 70-some fellow passengers on the trip were pious, sober-minded Protestants who frowned on Twain’s gambling, drinking, smoking, and cursing. Twain poked fun at these ‘pilgrims’ and their unquestioning parroting of the romanticized chronicles of Holy Land travels that he, like them, had perused in preparation for the trip. The travelers’ guidebook of choice was William C. Prime’s Tent Life in the Holy Land—an 1857 copy of which is displayed in the exhibit, open to a page showing an illustration of the domed structure of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Twain’s account of Prime’s purported adventures is characteristically droll: ‘He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver, and the other on his pocket-handkerchief. Always, when he was not on the point of crying over a holy place, he was on the brink of killing an Arab. More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever happened to any traveler here or elsewhere.’

“Throughout the trip, Twain highlighted the disparity between the desire of his guidebook-led companions to see what they had been promised and the reality of what was actually in front of them. The contrast reached its peak once they arrived in the Holy Land. ‘I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine,’ he commented, beginning with the reality of the relatively small size of the local grapes he saw, as opposed to the enormous vines portrayed in his favorite Bible story illustrations: ‘I must begin a system of reduction. Like my grapes which the spies bore out of the Promised Land, I have got everything in Palestine on too large a scale. . . . The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. . . . I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.’ Similarly, Jerusalem itself seemed ‘[s]o small! Why, it was no larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants,’ he wrote.

“What seemed to rankle most—and brought out some of Twain’s most biting satire—was the fanciful commentary provided by local guides eager to show the travelers sites such as ‘the tomb of Adam.’ He writes, ‘How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home and friends and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Prague

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