When Quebec’s « Salon bleu » was the « Salon vert »

One Westminster tradition replicated in many times and places across the Commonwealth is a convention of colour: the lower house of a parliament is decorated in green, while the upper chamber is decorated in red. This reflects the green benches of the House of Commons and the red ones of the House of Lords.

Officially the plenary chamber of Quebec’s unicameral parliament is boringly the salle de l’Assemblée nationale but because of the colour of its walls it is more often known as the Salon bleu. One’s never surprised when Quebec bucks a trend or (more specifically) rejects an Anglo convention but it turns out the province’s plenary chamber did in fact used to be green until relatively recently.

When the members of the Legislative Assembly (as it then was) first convened in the Hôtel du Parlement in 1886 the walls were actually white. By the opening of the 1895 session the desks had been reappointed in green, but Le Soleil still made reference to the room as the “chambre blanche”. It was only in 1901 that the room was painted a “soft green” and the carpets and other furnishings changed accordingly. It even made an appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film “I Confess”.

From then the chamber was a Salon vert until 1978, when the decision was taken to begin broadcasting the proceedings of the Assemblée nationale.

The television specialists complained that the dark green of the chamber was not visually conducive to the TV cameras available at the time and, looking at the evidence from the 1977 test session (above), one can see their point. Walls of either beige or blue were the options recommended in an official report, and unsurprisingly the national colour was chosen.

The historian Gaston Deschênes has mentioned the technical requirements of broadcasting also coincided with a desire to break with a “British” tradition. Certainly the government of the day, René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois, didn’t mind the change, while Maurice Bellemare — “the old lion of Quebec politics” and sometime leader of the old Union nationale — was deeply pleased that the chamber adopted the colour of Quebec’s flag.

So the walls were repainted sky blue and the furnishings changed accordingly, resulting in the Salon bleu we know today (below).

A tweet from the Assemblée’s official account shows two photos looking towards the chamber’s entrance from before (above) and after (below) it was made ready for television.

All the same, green is not universal amongst Commonwealth lower (or only) chambers. It’s not even universal in Canada: Manitoba joins Quebec in its azure tones while British Columbia’s is red-dominated.

Quebec was the last of Canada’s provinces to abolish its upper house, the Legislative Council, in 1968 (at the same time the lower house was renamed the National Assembly). The Legislative Council’s former meeting place is, of course, red, and the Salon rouge is used for important occasions like inductions into the Ordre national du Québec or the lying-in-state of the late Jacques Parizeau.

In the early 1930s the City of Paris decided the Musée de Luxembourg had become too small to continue as the city’s gallery of contemporary art. At the same time, the French Republic was beginning to think it needed a proper museum of modern art to display its own collections as well. The City and the Republic joined forces to build a new palace of art in time for the 1937 International Exposition.

While the City and the Republic would house their collections at a single site the museums were to remain separate, so in May 1937 the Palace of the Museums (plural) of Modern Art was inaugurated by President Lebrun.

Because of its riparian location on the Avenue de Tokio (renamed to Avenue de New-York in 1945) the building quickly became known as the Palais de Tokyo. (more…)

In Rome the other week I was sorry to hear from a mutual friend that Angela Wrapson had died. She had been fighting cancer for a while, but she was quite a fighter and was one of those people you thought would always go on.

Angela was, amongst many things, a fixture of that strange yet familiar galaxy known as the Scottish arts world. She was, for example, director of the Stanza poetry festival for some years.

She was a keen listener, a good conversationalist, and a very welcoming hostess in the wing of Brunstane House that she and her husband George bought back in the 1970s.

From 2015 to 2017, George was the MP for East Lothian and I am still ashamed in those two years I never managed to reciprocate Angela and George’s hospitality by having them round.

Nonetheless, I was pleased to see she got the plaudits she deserved with obituaries in the Scotsman, the Times, and the Herald.

May she rest in peace.

The UK’s Supreme Court is a nine-year experiment that has failed

If you open the hood of your car and mess about with the engine you can hardly be surprised if, later, it stops working at just the wrong moment. Likewise, constitutions by their very nature ought not to be fiddled with, and the current crisis in Westminster is ample proof.

Under the old system – before the Supreme Court and Fixed Term Parliaments Act – there would have been no crisis at all. The Prime Minister would see there is no working majority in favour of any way forward and would simply call a general election. Hypothetically, this would result in a government with a majority capable of moving business forward – all without much controversy.

Since FTPA was passed, however, the PM now needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament in order to bring about an election and the Opposition has up to this point blocked any chance at referring to the electorate in fear that the voters will back Boris over Corbyn. At the time it was passed, proponents argued not much would change with FTPA, as the point of the Opposition is to try and become the Government and what Opposition in its right mind would ever turn down the chance to fight a general election at a moment of crisis?

Enter now the Supreme Court in a timely intervention over the Prime Minister’s decision to end the longest parliamentary session on record by advising the Queen to prorogue Parliament over the long-planned conference recess. The Court has only been in operation since 2009, when it was created because legal experts and constitutional gurus told us it wasn’t correct for the highest court of appeal to technically be part of the legislature (even though this practice had been ratified by centuries of experience and had failed to present any difficulties).

The old system was robust and flexible; it is the innovation which has created stasis. Before it bent: now it breaks. Britain’s unwritten constitution is often summarised as “The Crown-in-Parliament is Supreme”. That means the Government exercises power with the authority of the Sovereign under the scrutiny of and with the confidence of Parliament. With the final court of appeal removed from the Parliament, where did that leave the Supreme Court? The justices have sought to answer with a judgement asserting that they are the ultimate authority in the land, supreme even over the exercise of the Royal Prerogative.

This runs contrary to the entire thrust of the UK’s constitutional development, which – up until this point – has been to strengthen scrutiny of the exercise of power and to increase the accountability of those who exercise that power. The Supreme Court’s judgement is a massive expansion of the justices’ own power without any counterbalancing accountability. When the Prime Minister exercises power he is held accountable by his need to maintain the confidence of his party colleagues and of the House of Commons. If he fails to do so he can be replaced as PM or ultimately his party can be chucked out by voters in a general election. How are Supreme Court justices to be held accountable though? What actions can voters take when justices overstep the bounds?

If justices seek to exercise political power than they must face concomitant levels of scrutiny and accountability that don’t – yet – exist. They cannot expect to receive the traditional obeisance and deference of politicians and the general public that the pre-Supreme Court judiciary received if they fail to observe the same self-restraint and respect for the Parliament’s role as legislature that the pre-Supreme Court judiciary observed.

The fundamental question is what the appropriate reaction of an ordered society is when judges overstep their bounds. If a Conservative majority government – presuming that is even the result of the next election – fails to respond appropriately to the Supreme Court’s ruling it is difficult to see how the UK can avoid going down the American route of a highly politicised judiciary. Ultimately, this would mean greater parliamentary oversight in the appointment of justices to the Supreme Court. Would they be prepared for long hearings in parliamentary committee rooms where every aspect of their past (including their student antics at university) were dredged before the public? Would voters be prepared to accept that an unaccountable Supreme Court can overturn any action of a democratically accountable executive or law passed by a democratically elected parliament with which the justices disagreed?

A Conservative majority government could easily, by simple Act of Parliament, remove the Royal Prerogative from the purview of the Supreme Court and further clarify (meaning restrict) the Court’s room for manoeuvre. But perhaps this isn’t a problem that can be fixed by tweaking. Trying to make sure justices understand they don’t have the authority to make naked power grabs seems impossible when you have an establishment that, in legal circles and otherwise, believes its will overrides the democratic mandate of the people in a constitutional monarchy. Restrictive legislation can help clarify, but it won’t strike at the heart of the institutional cockiness the Supreme Court exudes. (Remember that it ominously chose the Greek letter omega – symbolising finality – as its official emblem.)

Far better, then, to concede our own humility and accept that the Supreme Court has been a nine-year experiment which has failed. This would mean repealing those provisions of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 which created Supreme Court in 2009 and going back to having Lords of Appeal in Ordinary sitting as the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. There would be no problem with Law Lords continuing to sit in Middlesex Guildhall across Parliament Square as the Supreme Court does today.

Opponents must accept that the unaccountability the Supreme Court seeks to exercise belongs to another era: we live in the age of transparency, accountability, and taking back control.

History is littered with coups and grabs for power. Some succeed, others are attempted and fail. This “constitutional coup” can be foiled, but it requires a general election, a Conservative majority, and a government intent upon deliberate action.

A giant of Argentine journalism died this summer: Andrew Graham-Yooll.

Born in Buenos Aires early in 1944 to a Scottish father and an English mother, Graham-Yooll made his name at the premier institution of Anglo-Argentina, the now-defunct daily Buenos Aires Herald which he joined aged 22 in 1966.

“The Herald newsdesk supped for Dutch courage a local brandy,” the Times notes, “supplemented with a pâté that Graham-Yooll made of goose livers lashed with gin. A chain-smoker, he would construct tiny houses from matchsticks.”

As the Herald’s news editor during Isabel Perón’s presidency he published the names of dissidents who had gone missing or “disappeared” and, more bravely, continued to do so after Señora Perón was succeeded by a military junta.

The new rulers, who Borges warmly welcomed as “gentlemen”, put Graham-Yooll on trial for publishing interviews with the guerrillas who were terrorising the country. He was acquitted, but accepted the gentle advice of the judge who suggested he might find existence more comfortable outside the borders of the Argentine Republic.

Graham-Yooll continued writing for the Daily Telegraph and Guardian in Great Britain but made a brief foray home in 1982 during the Falklands War before being permanently welcomed home by a democratic government in 1984. Ten years later he was appointed editor of the Herald.

“Things you think you can rely on and trust are just not there,” Graham-Yooll said in Edinburgh when picking up his OBE in 2002.

“You can’t trust the bank, you can’t trust the post office or the people who sell you a house. You can’t trust the politicians, obviously. It’s a friendly society but it lacks strict rules. It’s evil, but it is also attractive to live in a place where you don’t have to live by rules.”

“I don’t know where I could go now. It was always home, even in the worst days, and it still is.”

Economics alone will not join what history has rent asunder

Academics John Rodden and John Rossi have an interesting but poorly argued piece in the normally-quite-good American Conservative “asking” the question of whether Brexit could unite Ireland at last. While ostensibly they merely posit the question, they lay out an unintended-consequences scenario for Irish political unity coming about.

If Brexit goes “wrong” then the imposition of a hard border in Ireland will drive Northern Ireland’s Protestant/Unionist community into the arms of the Republic. If there’s no hard border, then Northern Ireland and the Republic will progress down a path of natural economic integration while, Rodden and Rossi argue, “economic divergence from Britain with no hard border will show northerners that their long-term interests now lie with Dublin”.

There are some obvious problems with the Rodden/Rossi scenario.

First, the EU’s customs and economic union has already applied to Northern Ireland and the Republic for decades now and yet Northern Ireland is not economically integrated into the Republic. Of goods that leave Northern Ireland, the rest of the UK is still the strongest destination: In 2016 £10.5 billion of goods left NI for Great Britain, compared to £2.7 billion to the Republic.

True, Ulster is more vulnerable in that a bigger chunk of their exports head south of the border than the Republic’s exports head north of it. But after decades of trade barriers being torn down by the EU these two economies remain very much distinct.

Second, Rodden and Rossi fall into the trap of economic determinist thinking. The roots of Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland divide are not economic. Ireland’s six north-easterly counties were excluded from the Irish Free State in 1921 because of the tribal fears of those counties’ Protestant/Unionist majorities of being powerless in a state that would have an overwhelming Catholic/Nationalist majority. Some of these fears were well-reasoned and considered, others were wildly irrational and bigoted.

The important thing to realise is that the divide between Nationalists and Unionists is not formed on the basis of economic arguments, though either side can deploy economic arguments in their favour. It is simply not the case that a significant chunk of Northern Ireland’s Protestant Unionist community are going to wake up some day soon and think “Well, I’ve always liked our Union Jacks, Orange marches, and devotion to the Queen but Northern Ireland might be able to achieve a 2.3% better rate of growth if we join the Republic so I’ll run up the tricolour and paint my curbside green, white, and orange”.

Third, as Rodden and Rossi confusingly point out, the coming demographic majority Catholics will achieve in Northern Ireland does not automatically equate to all-Ireland unity: An astonishingly large proportion of Northern Irish Catholics wish to maintain links to the United Kingdom. They will continue to vote for Sinn Féin and the SDLP in elections because these parties are viewed as those who vie to look after their community’s interests. But that does not necessarily mean they want to cut all ties to the UK or sign up for a 32-county unitary republic.

“Ah!,” they say. “But hard Brexit!” This is the fourth point why Rodden and Rossi are wrong. They argue that a hard Brexit would necessitate a hard border with the imposition of frontier infrastructure, tolls, taxes, etc. Rodden and Rossi claim that “[t]he only workable plan for Brexit that will prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is for the north to stay in the EU customs area despite Brexit.”

This is simply not true. By now almost everyone has conceded, including civil servants in both London and Dublin, that even in the event of a No Deal Brexit (which has pretty much been ruled out) the technology already exists to provide a fairly seamless border. The few companies whose cross-border trade would fall into the relevant categories could be checked not at the border but electronically. While anti-Brexiteers spent months arguing that this was an impossible pipe dream, the number of researchers, customs agents, civil servants, and others who point out that the technology exists and has been used in similar scenarios for years is now so voluminous as to render the argument irrelevant.

(Rodden and Rossi are also entirely incorrect in claiming that Northern Ireland has adopted “quite restrictive” laws on “abortion and gay rights”. In fact, Northern Ireland’s post-1998 democratically elected representatives have mostly decided against taking action to change existing laws on these subjects even though they have been altered or repealed in England, Wales, and Scotland.)

There are other problems with the Rodden/Rossi economic determinist case for a united Ireland. For one thing, there is an economic determinist argument against it. The Republic of Ireland is a relatively prosperous country, though obviously not without its problems. Though romanticism and patriotism have deep roots, the Republic’s taxpayer base might balk at taking on the highly subsidy-reliant Northern Irish economy, even if only with a mind to transitioning it to a more free-market scenario.

Furthermore, sources in the Irish Defence Forces are quick to express their anguish at the army’s much diminished capacity even to carry out its existing commitments with the United Nations. Northern Ireland separating from the United Kingdom and joining the Republic would almost certainly spark a revival of violence amongst a minority of the province’s loyalists. Are voters in the Republic really that keen to take on an economic and counter-terrorist burden?

All this may sound a bit Cassandra-like, especially coming from a writer with traditional “Up Dev” Fianna Fáil sympathies, but these are all factors that need to be considered and which significantly inhibit the likelihood (completely separate from the wisdom) of Irish political unity in the near future.

Namibia spent more than twice as long under South African administration then it did when it was German South West Africa, but its formative years under the Germans continue to have an influence.

For one thing, you can stumble around streets marked Zeppelinstraße and Bismarckstraße, not to mention the quite quaffable beer the country produces. Germany’s most remembered act in Namibia, alas, is the massacre of the Herero tribe, whose women are today known for their colourful pseudo-Victorian traditional dress.

Still, a third of the country’s white population are of German descent and German was an official language until 1990, though Namibian Black German (which linguists debate whether it is a dialect or a pidgin) is now nearly extinct. Most German Namibians today would speak Afrikaans on an everyday basis and have a strong grasp of English too.

But what does the average Namibian on the street know of Germany? In the above video a man goes about asking precisely that. Particularly interesting is that moneyed Frankfurt seems to be much better known than the political capital of Berlin. If only there was a video asking Germans what they know of Namibia…

If you haven’t already then you have not much longer to purchase a copy of this week’s Catholic Herald which includes an article on the strange death of Christian democracy.

Obviously we want the grand poobahs of the Herald to associate higher sales with the Cusackian presence on the front page, so go out and grab it while you still can.

After Mass on Sunday I told Lally she had to buy it and she scowled I’ve already read it online actually. This is precisely not the attitude to take. Anton’ bought two copies.

If you live in realms where the Herald is not physically available, then I suppose you can read the article online.

Sigrid Undset’s is doubtlessly among the twentieth century’s greatest writers, even though Kristin Lavransdatter, her main works of literature, is set in the fourteenth century. At the ceremony awarding Undset the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature, Per Hallström described the writer’s narrative as “vigorous, sweeping, and at times heavy”:

It rolls on like a river, ceaselessly receiving new tributaries whose course the author also describes, at the risk of overtaxing the reader’s memory. […] And the vast river, whose course is difficult to embrace comprehensively, rolls its powerful waves which carry along the reader, plunged into a sort of torpor. But the roaring of its waters has the eternal freshness of nature. In the rapids and in the falls, the reader finds the enchantment which emanates from the power of the elements, as in the vast mirror of the lakes he notices a reflection of immensity, with the vision there of all possible greatness in human nature. Then, when the river reaches the sea, when Kristin Lavransdatter has fought to the end the battle of her life, no one complains of the length of the course which accumulated so overwhelming a depth and profundity in her destiny. In the poetry of all times, there are few scenes of comparable excellence.

Obviously Kristin Lavransdatter must be read for itself. I started reading it in the Stellenbosch University library a decade ago and was able to finish it thanks to being given a copy by a kindly Premonstratensian.

But the woman behind Kristin wrote more: her biographical essays and other works (like the one describing a visit to Glastonbury) are just as enjoyable and insightful.

At First Things, Elizabeth Scalia describes Undset’s lives of saints and holy men and women in Sigrid Undset’s Essays for Our Time.

Stephen Sparrow reveals much of Undset’s own biographical detail and how this influenced her writing in Sigrid Undset: Catholic Viking.

But the best essay I’ve read on Sigrid Undset so far is David Warren’s meditation on womanhood, motherhood, and Kristin Lavransdatter. I don’t agree with everything he says (I rather enjoyed the new translation but am thinking I might have to give the old one a go), but David gets Kristin the character, gets Kristin the novel, and gets the way that life is refracted through both.

Read David Warren, then read Sigrid Undset.

Today is Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the Blessed Virgin Mary and announced that she would conceive and bear the child Jesus.

The angelic salutation – “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee… Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus” – forms the basis of the Ave Maria, one of the most widely uttered prayers in Christendom.

Traditionally this has been one of the greatest of devotions to the Virgin amongst the English, which is why there are so many pubs across England named ‘The Salutation’.

For centuries in England and Scotland (as well as elsewhere), Lady Day was the first day of the calendar year. Scotland moved this to 1 January in 1600 and England did likewise in 1750.

Nonetheless, the English tax year is still based on this date as it commences on 6 April, which is the Annunciation plus twelve days to mark the difference between the old Julian calendar and the modern Gregorian one.

In the realms of fiction, 25 March is the day Tolkien chose for when Frodo destroyed the Ring in Mount Doom, securing the fall of Sauron – with obvious parallels to Christ’s Incarnation securing the defeat of Satan.

This stained glass roundel above is not English, however, but from the Southern Netherlands around 1500-1510.

Elsewhere, A Clerk of Oxford has a good section on the Annunciation.

Paris and New York are two cities radically different in design and character, but they are smashed together in this little project from architect Luis Fernandes.

‘Haussmanhattan’ is a portmanteau of Baron Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine whose reconfiguration of the French capital made it the Paris we know today, and Manhattan, the most renowned of New York City’s five boroughs.

Haussmann’s plan of broad boulevards and radial avenues is a far cry from the artless Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 which created the unforgiving city blocks that colonised the entire island of Manhattan ad infinitum.

The contrast only makes the pick-and-mix Fernandes has confected all the more fun/ridiculous/interesting.

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Sir John Soane still looms over the intervening centuries of architecture and design in Great Britain, but I’ve never actually known what he looked like. Apparently this is him, in an 1804 portrait by William Owen.

Everyone’s been to his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but Pitzhanger Manor, his place in the country (though Ealing hardly seems rural today) was recently reopened after serious conservation works ongoing since 2015.

Hope to pay it a visit soon.

The patroonship of Rensselaerswyck was erected in 1630 giving its patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, feudal powers over a large parcel of land on the banks of the Hudson River. Despite exercising a strong influence on the growth and development of New Netherland and the Hudson Valley, Kiliaen never actually stepped foot in the new world but kept close control of his domain from across the ocean in Amsterdam.

Jan Baptist was Kiliaen’s second surviving son, and served as director at the ‘colony’ as it was often known from 1652 to 1658. He commissioned Evert Duyckinck to make this painted-glass window displaying his coat of arms in 1656 and gave it to the Dutch Reformed Church in Beverwyck (today’s Albany).

While the congregation still exists — and celebrated its 375th anniversary in 2017 — the original church was demolished in 1805 and the window moved to the Van Rensselaer Manor House which itself survived til 1890 before facing the wrecking ball. The window was preserved and was left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the 1951 bequest of Mrs J. Insley Blair and while well documented it does not appear to be on display at the moment.

The patroonship itself was converted into a manorial lordship by the English authorities after they took over and survived until it was broken up amongst relatives after the death of Stephen van Rensselaer III in 1839.

This last great patroon had proved an indulgent lord and the efforts of his inheritors to claim uncollected back rents led to the 1839-1845 “Helderberg War” or “Anti-Rent War” of tenants revolting against the system. The great landholders, seeing the end was nigh, were convinced to sell up and in 1846 the state of New York adopted a new constitution abolishing feudal tenure. The era of patroonships and manors in the Hudson Valley had come to an end.

The colours of the Republic

by Karlheinz Weißmann — Junge Freiheit 18 February 2019
(slapdash unofficial totally unauthorised translation)

At the end of December 1918, Harry Graf Kessler noted confusedly in his diary that supporters of the [liberal republican] German Democratic Party (DDP) had marched through the centre of Berlin, with the “Greater German colours” black-red-gold and singing Der Wacht am Rhein.

In fact, the left-wing liberals were the only political group next to the Völkisch movement who had clung on to the black-red-gold. For both of them, it was about the ideal of an all-German state, including the Austrians. For the Liberals, it also represented the ideals of the revolution of 1848, while for the Völkisch there was the idea that black, red, and gold were the ancient Aryan colours.

During the period of downfall in 1918 it wasn’t the black-red-gold that mattered: it was the red of the socialists. Majority and Independent Social Democrats as well as the Communists all used it as a symbol. Red armbands, red cockades, and red flags marked the followers of the new republic, whose socialist underpinning was generally believed.

Black-red-gold as last option

By contrast, the old imperial colours of black-white-red almost disappeared. Significantly, the naval mutineers in Kiel had barely raised a hand to defend them. But the soldiers returning home from the front marched under black-white-red flags — which they had made themselves — and were received in the cities, even in Berlin, with black-white-red flags and decorations. The newly established Freikorps also deployed the old imperial colours, as did the cockade of the new Reichswehr whose ranks included many opposed to the republican order.

With this juxtaposition of revolutionary red and the black-white-red of tradition, black-red-gold — Schwarz-Rot-Gold — came as the last option. Some hoped that, on the one hand it would stand for moderation and against total upheaval, while on the other hand it suggested that defeat in the war did not spell the final downfall of the nation.

On 9 November 1918 an organ of the far right, the Alldeutschen Blätter, published an essay entitled “Black-Red-Gold”:

“The birth of Greater Germany is approaching! … Cheer the old black-red-golden colours! Decorate like Vienna your houses with the black-red-golden flags, bows, and bands and show all the world from Aachen and Königsberg to Bozen [Bolzano], Klagenfurt, and Laibach [Ljubljana] that we are a united people of brothers, in no distress of separation or peril.”

Symbol of treason

The 18 February 1919 decision of the State Committee of the Republic to adopt black-red-gold as provisional colours of the Reich was still supported by the expectation that a Greater German Republic would emerge. But the “Anschluss” of Austria was banned at the instigation of the victorious powers and in flagrant contradiction to the right of the self-determination of peoples. This resulted in the first serious discrediting of the black-red-gold.

The second was that black, red, and gold had been reputed to be a symbol of treason since the beginning of the war. A group of deserters and pacifists calling themselves the “Friends of the German Republic” — financed with French money and operating from Switzerland — used the colours for their cause as early as 1915, and as early as the spring of 1918 Entente aircraft distributed calls for desertion and revolution along the western front, marked with a black-red-gold stripe or border.

Almost certainly the majority of the population was relieved when, on instructions from the national government, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils adopted the black-red-gold [replacing the red of revolution] but passive acceptance was not enough to give the colour combination permanent support. This was particularly evident in the peculiar “flag compromise” presented by the government with the support of Majority Social Democrats, the Center Party, and part of the DDP during the deliberations of the National Assembly.

According to this compromise, the black-red-gold was introduced as the national flag, while the merchant ensign was the old black, white, and red — albeit with a small black-red-gold flag infelicitously shoved in the canton. Interior Minister Eduard David’s rationale for the choice — that the old colours had been “party” rather than “national” colours — simply did not correspond to fact.

Symbol of Greater Germany

Closer to the truth was the justification that black, red, and gold were the symbols of a Greater Germany. Interior Minister David said:

“What dynastic Germany could not do, democracy must succeed in doing: achieving moral conquests beyond the frontier and, above all, among those who by blood and language belong to us. To win the Greater German unity must now be our goal, not through war and violence, but through the recruiting power of the new republican Germany, and let us fly forward in front of the black-and-red-gold banner!”

In any case, Article 3 of the Weimar Constitution, which entered into force on 11 August 1919, was far from providing a sound answer to the flag question of the young state. As constiutional scholar Ernst-Rudolf Huber wrote:

“This Weimar flag compromise became the cause of endless strife. If the constitutional function of state colours exists in their symbolic power to integrate the state’s unity, the state-sanctioned dualism of contrasting colours manifested in the Weimar flag compromise is a permanent element of disintegration. The flag compromise, with its juxtaposition of the old and new colours, did not diminish the problem of the colour change but rather aggravate it.”

Die fees van Sint Valentyn in die Kaap

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The indispensable Canadian disputationist David Warren wrote a piece mentioning Sudharma, the only newspaper printed in Sanskrit, the “dead” language of ancient India. It reminded me of the story of when someone asked Borges if he knew any Sanskrit. “Only the Sanskrit everyone knows,” was the Argentine’s response.

Anyway, given that there’s a daily newspaper in Sanskrit, Mr Warren thinks it would be entirely for the good that a daily newspaper be published in Latin.

Why not just publish a good newspaper in English, you ask? (After all, these are severely lacking or perhaps non-existent.) Not enough, Mr Warren argues:

An honest and rational account of what is happening in the world would have to be politically incorrect, in the extreme. People would be outraged, and the ACLU would move to suppress it right away. There would be protests, and attacks by Antifa; racism, misogyny, homophobia, would be alleged. The staff would not be safe to come to work.

Anyone caught reading it near a university would immediately be surrounded by shrieking harpies, and their careers in academia or elsewhere would end. Something like the #MeToo movement would be launched on Twitter, to root these people out.

Whereas, a newspaper in Latin would pass right under the progressive radar. Only those who could read Latin would take it, and almost all of them are mentally stable. Others would be trying to learn Latin, so they could also find out what is going on. Their efforts would contribute to the Catholic underground, where Latin use is spreading.

Expert Latinist Mons. Daniel Gallagher then took to the metaphorical presses of the same inprint to argue that:

Equidem desidero, potiusquam parvam sanitatis insulam, acta diurna praebere quae tot disceptationes ac disputationes provocent quot in lingua Latina, per linguam Latinam atque circa linguam Latinam provocatae sunt per saecula. Haec enim dirigam acta diurna non tantum ad principes verum etiam ad populum ipsum.

By which, in a manner of speaking, he meant:

Rather than offering “a little elitist island of sanity and spiritual calm,” I would want the paper to generate as much lively discussion and debate as always has and always will be generated in, around, and through Latin. I would want to aim the paper at the populus and not just the principes.

And Mr Warren then replies to the reply thus (in item the second).

Go and read all three; they make sound arguments.

As a black Jewish Catholic, Claudia McNeil was pretty much everything the Ku Klux Klan hated. She was born to a black father and a part-Apache mother in Baltimore, Maryland but in her teenage years was adopted by a Jewish family in New York who instructed her in Judaism and taught her fluent Yiddish.

She married aged 19 but lost her husband in the Second World War and both her sons in the Korean War.

After training as a librarian, McNeil drifted into vaudeville theatre and nightclubs, eventually making her Broadway debut in 1953 as Tituba in The Crucible.

“The Jewish faith left an indelible stamp on her spirit,” Ebony magazine reported in 1960, “but she became a convert to Catholicism in 1952.” McNeil often reported that she stopped to pray before every evening’s performance.

Her most famous role was as the matriarch in A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, reprised in the 1961 film in both of which Sidney Poitier also starred.

Deeply appreciative of the gifts God gave her, McNeil was known never to turn down a chance to appear at charity benefit performances, especially for the NAACP and the American Jewish Congress.

Despite the losses she suffered in her life Claudia McNeil insisted “I have everything I’ve ever wanted from life.”

“I have more work than I can do. I have a nice, cheerful, comfortable home. I am solvent. Above all, I have strength, health, and peace of mind. I know where I’m going. I am an American citizen. I love my country. I pay my taxes and vote, and I intend to have a say in how my country is run.”

McNeil retired in 1983 and died ten years later.

There has been a distinct increase in the number of missives sent out from Huis Cusack to editorial offices across Europe and beyond as part of my slow but inevitable transformation into “Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells”. It all started with an extremely pedantic letter to the TLS regarding PG Wodehouse, banking, and the collapse of the rupee that was printed in October 2008.

It escaped my notice at the time but it turns out the editors of The Times of London were short of anything decent to print last November so stuck one of my letters in. Very kind of them.

Sir, There is a parallel to the situation of Britons involuntarily losing their EU citizenship: the unionists who fell on the southern side of the border when Ireland was partitioned in 1921. Like the British in Europe today, many Irish then felt themselves secondarily or primarily British or at least strongly associated with Great Britain, given the unitary state which had existed for more than a century. More Irish volunteered their service and their lives for the British crown than ever did for an Irish republic.

As an Irish citizen resident in the UK I appreciate the generosity of spirit whereby Ireland is not a “foreign” country. Irish in Britain today have full civil and political rights above and beyond those of other EU citizens, and this is reciprocated in the Republic (except for presidential elections and referendums).

Were the EU to extend such generosity and reciprocity to the UK after Brexit it would go a long way to furthering our common identity and friendship.

ANDREW CUSACK
London SW3

Of course I am as poblachtánach as anyone else — Up Dev and all that — but one does appreciate the difficulty of those Irish who also identified as British once the Free State was erected. But then given my background (Irish New Yorker educated there, in Argentina, Scotland, and South Africa, resident in London) I don’t see any problem with a multiplicity of overlapping identities. All the same, when people imply they will somehow mystically cease to be European come 29 March it just makes them look silly. Great Britain has always been a European country and always will be.

I blame Ulster, the French Revolution, and the Fall of Man.

The dome of the old Police Headquarters Centre Street in New York.

Instagram: @andcusack

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