Fire Rescue at the Fire Museum

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Fire Rescue at the Fire Museum


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The history of organized firefighting dates back at least to Ancient Egypt, where hand-operated pumps may have been employed to extinguish fires.

he first Roman fire brigade of which we have any substantial history was created by Marcus Licinius Crassus. Marcus Licinius Crassus was born into a wealthy Roman family around the year 115 BC, and acquired an enormous fortune through (in the words of Plutarch) "fire and rapine." One of his most lucrative schemes took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department. Crassus filled this void by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the fire fighters did nothing while their employer bargained over the price of their services with the distressed property owner. If Crassus could not negotiate a satisfactory price, his men simply let the structure burn to the ground, after which he offered to purchase it for a fraction of its value. Augustus took the basic idea from Crassus and then built on it to form the Vigiles in AD 6 to combat fires using bucket brigades and pumps, as well as poles, hooks and even ballistae to tear down buildings in advance of the flames. The Vigiles patrolled the streets of Rome to watch for fires and served as a police force. The later brigades consisted of hundreds of men, all ready for action. When there was a fire, the men would line up to the nearest water source and pass buckets hand in hand to the fire.

In Europe, firefighting was quite rudimentary until the 17th century. In 1254, a royal decree of King Saint Louis of France created the so-called guet bourgeois ("burgess watch"), allowing the residents of Paris to establish their own night watches, separate from the king’s night watches, to prevent and stop crimes and fires. After the Hundred Years’ War, the population of Paris expanded again, and the city, much larger than any other city in Europe at the time, was the scene of several great fires in the 16th century. As a consequence, King Charles IX disbanded the residents’ night watches and left the king’s watches as the only one responsible for checking crimes and fires.

London suffered great fires in 798, 982, 989, 1212 and above all in 1666 (Great Fire of London). The Great Fire of 1666 started in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane, consumed about two square miles (5 km²) of the city, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Prior to this fire, London had no organized fire protection system. Afterwards, insurance companies formed private fire brigades to protect their clients’ property. Insurance brigades would only fight fires at buildings the company insured. These buildings were identified by fire insurance marks. The key breakthrough in firefighting arrived in the 17th century with the first fire engines. Manual pumps, rediscovered in Europe after 1500 (allegedly used in Augsburg in 1518 and in Nuremberg in 1657), were only force pumps and had a very short range due to the lack of hoses. German inventor Hans Hautsch improved the manual pump by creating the first suction and force pump and adding some flexible hoses to the pump. In 1672, Dutch inventor Jan Van der Heyden invented the fire hose. Constructed of flexible leather and coupled every 50 feet (15 m) with brass fittings, the length remains the standard to this day in mainland Europe whilst in the UK the standard length is either 23m or 25m. The fire engine was further developed by Richard Newsham of London in 1725. Pulled as a cart to the fire, these manual pumps were manned by teams of men and could deliver up to 160 gallons per minute.

In 1631 Boston’s governor John Winthrop outlawed wooden chimneys and thatched roofs.[1] In 1648, the New Amsterdam governor Peter Stuyvesant appointed four men to act as fire wardens. They were empowered to inspect all chimneys and to fine any violators of the rules. The city burghers later appointed eight prominent citizens to the "Rattle Watch" – these men volunteered to patrol the streets at night carrying large wooden rattles. If a fire was seen, the men spun the rattles, then directed the responding citizens to form bucket brigades. On January 27, 1678 the first fire engine company went into service with its captain (foreman) Thomas Atkins. In 1736 Benjamin Franklin established the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia.

George Washington was a volunteer firefighter in Alexandria, Virginia. In 1774, as a member of the Friendship Veterans Fire Engine Company, he bought a new fire engine and gave it to the town, which was its very first. However the United States did not have government-run fire departments until around the time of the American Civil War. Prior to this time, private fire brigades compete with one another to be the first to respond to a fire because insurance companies paid brigades to save buildings.[citation needed] Underwriters also employed their own Salvage Corps in some cities. The first known female firefighter Molly Williams took her place with the men on the dragropes during the blizzard of 1818 and pulled the pumper to the fire through the deep snow.

The History of the Fire Museum of Greater Cincinnati
In 1906, the building that now houses the Fire Museum of Greater Cincinnati was home to the Engine Company #45 Firehouse. Because of this, the Fire Museum of Greater Cincinnati is now included in the National Register of Historic Places.

‘The election of Obama would, at a stroke, refresh our country’s spirit’


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OPINION

Guardian.co.uk | The Observer

November 2, 2008

‘The election of Obama would, at a stroke, refresh our country’s spirit’
It has been an epic campaign for the American Presidency and one which has been scrutinised at close quarters by the US’s finest writers on the New Yorker magazine – the country’s leading journal of politics and culture. Here, in their leader column ahead of the election, the editors of the magazine offer a brilliant analysis of the choice facing America, deconstruct the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates and finish with a powerful endorsement of Barack Obama as the man best suited to answer the grave challenges facing the next President

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching – that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a presidency has – at the levels of competence, vision and integrity – undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The presidency of George W Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican party – which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time – has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the convention in St Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardour.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush administration, the national debt, now approaching trillion, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a 0bn deficit, a precipitous fall from the 0bn surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top 1 per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our healthcare system, our environment and our physical, educational and industrial infrastructure.

At the same time, 150,000 American troops are in Iraq and 33,000 are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush administration manipulated, bullied and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than 0bn, have included the loss of more than 4,000 Americans, the wounding of 30,000, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of four and a half million men, women and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.

The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorised at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the ‘end of the American era’.

The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its ‘base’, with a nominee who evidently disliked George W Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina, in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian Right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a ‘compassionate conservative’, governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a ‘maverick’ willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalising relations with Vietnam, campaign finance reform and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003 he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.

Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightwards in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shockingly, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of ‘enhanced interrogation’ that he himself once endured in Vietnam – as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the CIA.

On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalised language of ‘reform’, but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call – in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in social security, Medicare and Medicaid – for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.

In Washington the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis – not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital – can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern – a melodramatic call to suspend his campaign and postpone the first presidential debate until the government bail-out plan was ready – soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.

By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance and foresight, he said: ‘A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.’ Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges and mass-transit systems and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade programme to reduce America’s carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 – an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, such as utilities, would acquire carbon allowances and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide bn a year for developing alternative energy sources and creating job-training programmes in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that 10 per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade programme as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea – lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling – and placed it at the centre of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be ‘insignificant’. Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan ‘Drill, baby, drill!’

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the justices of the Supreme Court, where four hardcore conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v Wade will be reversed and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999 he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006 he was saying that its demise ‘wouldn’t bother me any’; by 2008 he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe – which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalise it – would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain court. Efforts to expand executive power, which in recent years certain justices have nobly tried to resist, would be likely to increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither – all with just one new conservative nominee on the court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organisations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all US-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.

In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007, McCain risked his presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.

President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks ‘victory’ – a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.

Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honour: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline ‘the lessons of Iraq’, McCain said: ‘I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.’ A soldier’s answer – but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than will power and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.

Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international co-operation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation – the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.

The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less – and likely more – overseas.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character – and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said: ‘This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.’ The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said – but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made ‘change’ one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has provided has been in himself and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump – so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for 21 months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on Saturday Night Live, but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the back-up to a President of any age, much less to one who is 72 and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceptive, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatising, erratic and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a ‘maverick’ senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment.

Yet it is Obama’s temperament – and not McCain’s – that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centredness as self-centredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humour for lack of seriousness.

Nowadays almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. The Audacity of Hope (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate.

Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.

A presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. Dreams from My Father is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests – personal, spiritual, racial, political – that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policy-making experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organising among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law – these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly, long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organisation, technological proficiency and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate.

Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of ‘mere’ words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one – something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s ‘mere’ speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the centre of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential.

The election of Obama – a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of 21st-century America – would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting – rights acts of the 1960s and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/02/elections-obama-mcca…

Day of the Dead


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The day after Halloween is known for nothing more in Britain than the results of excessive sugar consumption and wiping egg from your front door.

But in Slovenia as in other Catholic countries 1 November is the Day of the Dead, a tradition European Catholics are wholly unaware evolved from the Aztecs’ worship of their deity Mictecacihuatl.

My exploration of Slovenia’s afterlife party began at a small graveyard in Ptuj, Slovenia’s oldest city. I had set off with a rucksack containing some equipment I thought might come in useful – a mouth organ, the skipping rope, and a cassette player. For jewellery I chose exclusive bracelets by Voodoo Chicken.

I have no Slovenian relatives, dead or otherwise, so this was never going to be more than reconnaissance for a Slovenian death. I am secure in my atheism. Being around religious people no longer irks me. You shouldn’t have sex with them, of course. Not really speaking Slovenian offers further protection from any strange ideas that might be floating around.

A few people were pottering around various plots but it was pretty dead. Like Peter Pan, the cemetery was clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that flow from trees. A woman stood over one grave smoking a fag. I found the tomb of the Klinger family.

Last opened in 1955 it was unattended. I enjoyed Klinger’s transvestite combat-dodging Korean War character in M.A.S.H. so I stood for a minute with the Klingers before heading off across town to a bigger, more successful graveyard.

Here there were many more people, both types. Familiar surnames from Facebook leapt out at me from a worryingly high proportion of the neatly-rowed monuments.

No beanstalks here. But would I see anyone I knew? Yes! Here was the plumber who sold me some copper pipe at a quick profit before disappearing forever without doing the work. But that is but a footnote in the sagas of Slovenian plumbing.

1.8288 METRES UNDER

Everyone was looking miserable. I wanted to cheer them up with some skipping, but it would send little stones flying at everyone. I mulled over the choice between blues harp and getting out the cassette to play "Fool For A Cigarette" by Ry Cooder.

But the sheer weight of this odd, organised death cult made any attempt at jollity pointless.

It was obvious that the purpose of this gathering had nothing to do with reminding us to live life to the full, especially not here and especially not now.

By two o’clock the gravewatching was going full pelt. This was just a lot of standing around in family groups though. There were no outward signs of grief, no crying, no hankies. No meeting the people from the grave next door. For a moment I thought a woman might be wiping away a tear. But she just had something in her eye. On death as in life Slovenians are as buttoned up as ever.

Burning of a good quantity of saponified fats was under way. At least some of the recent improvements to the European Capital of Chicken’s stink may be attributable to Slovenia’s highly developed memorial candle industry.

BACK FROM THE GRAVY

Like the fats, the chances of pulling a rich widow or a cynical young slut were to evaporate. The few more glamorous widows present had already spent the money on perms and leatherwear. As for guerillas in the midst, Ptuj has no edge players to keep these type of proceedings in balance.

I took a seat near the obligatory suffering Jesus. If only, in real life, he had been provided with a little roof to keep off the elements, as here, he might have suffered longer. At this venue his upturned-V-shaped canopy had vicious-looking serrated edges like a log saw, suggesting that Our Saviour was about to be bitten in two by a copper crocodile, on top of everything else.

As I pondered the meaning of this, a team arrived to erect PA speakers on either side of Jesus, in a parody of where the criminals are supposed to go. Marjan, owner of Catholic-metal pub Shamerocks, went by. An enormous howl of feedback almost jolted me off the bench. "Ena, dva, ena, dva." Crocodile Rock Jesus seemed a real possibility.

The sun’s rays belted down unseasonably on the dark-clad worshippers. One or two alcoholics in various shades of religious purple shuffled by. But widows outnumbered widowers by a considerable margin. By now the meaty aroma of cheap candles was becoming quite sickening. More feedback sent the vibe lurching in the direction of Dead concert.

Ritualised misery edged into maudlin despair. The dead themselves, unconcerned with their fetishisation, slept on. "What are we to do?" the expressions seemed to say. People talked a little. But there did not seem to be any fresh ideas on how to prevent more of this sort of thing.

They died not from environmental or genetic causes, but from Acts of God. Helplessness, futility, and insurance premiums seemed to be the order of the day.

DUDS FOR THE DEAD

Evidently a goodly part of the pain and stress of the Day of the Dead comes from deciding what to wear.

Slovenians, often drab at the best of times, can however play with drab. A tall blonde in fishnets and black and white plaid brightened proceedings ever so slightly. Or why not go grey: here was a lad in Desert Storm camoflauge. Ladies vied for Dead-glam with bauble necklaces from H&M, alligator skin boots, a binbag-flavour puffa jacket and a black spandex top from the Nolans era.

Priests appeared and disappeared into the little building for their quick change. Would they emerge dressed as Sister Wendy and Captain Hook? What about the Lost Boys? If I struck up The Sailor’s Hornpipe on the harmonica would the crowd these priests control at that moment come to life, if only to kill me?

There was little or no eye contact or interaction between priests and crowd. This religion involves a lot of looking down. A survey of priests’ footwear revealed that sandals, hush puppies, and pigskin were in. In Catholic circles it seems brown shoes do make it. Inside the chapel a choir was kicking off.

The procession of relatively colourful priests emerged and the choir, like Dylan, sold out and went electric. The fat churchmen – not all looking like the kind of character you would not trust alone with your nine-year-old son or daughter if you were some kind of naive country bumpkin – lined up for incantations and there was some very nice singing of "Naj na mir gospod" from the poor people in jeans and hoodies, as a woman in velveteen strides and lace-up stiletto dominatrix boots picked her way across the gravel with a big kinky shiny black clutch bag.

HERE TO DIE…

As a priest took the mike to deliver some advice to the assembled mourners, several people seemed to make a point of leaving. Coincidence maybe, or perhaps they didn’t get any practical help from the church before their dear departed, and they weren’t in the mood to start listening now.

If so, one wonders why they came, on this particular day, or at all. This is symptomatic of the ambivalent relationship with Rome here in Slovenia, where even the angriest atheists unblinkingly do Catholic things. Obediently and without question.

Atheism is the fashionable top-coat, a badge of modernity. Disappointingly, this is image atheism, devoid of argument, spineless. Deep down in their Y-fronts and panties Slovenians have their metaphysics and their mummies all mixed up – and you can’t get more Catholic than that.

Priests began moving through the crowd. A man flinched as a fat one flicked allegedly holy water in his face rather aggressively, the way you would dry a paint brush. You can’t be too careful when vampires are about.

After a gigantic monk had had his turn, a priest with a very deep voice got the crowd muttering. They seemed to know the words. Flanked by his fellow pirates right there under the mast/cross, his Blair-ish wavering hypnotic cadences were amplified through some miracle into a monotone in glorious mono via 250 watts per channel of Golgotha, bringing into focus the fear and trembling our Catlick cousins love so much.

A sea of conformist faces droned away and the three great hepcats, oče, sin and sveti duh, were duly honoured. It could as easily have been Marx, Engels and Tito. And if either trio might have preferred to bury the other, all six were united against the most dangerous ideological enemy Yugoslavia ever faced.

A BIG LYE

Although I did hear "incesta" mentioned it could have been something about a road. Anyway, no-one jumped up and shouted "You ruined my life!" While there was no great enthusiasm from either ministers or ministered, neither was there any sign of all this going away. Everyone was trapped in the cycle, paralysed, no more able to decide what to do next than the occupants of the graves themselves.

All in all a sea of utter dreariness, on which the faithful are destined to sail, directionless, for some time to come.

Is there anything the church might try to liven up this unpleasant occasion? I’m sure the Aztec Queen of the Underworld would be the first to offer social approval were some ergot to take root in the sacramental Jesus munchies, or the heady aroma of kaneh-bosem gave them inspiration.

How can you believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that comes from God only? Because doing what society expects you to do – and for no other reason – helps you to stop other people having fun, and it helps them to stop yours. God isn’t available just now to interfere in your sexual happiness. But your relatives and neighbours have a direct line.

Christianization of the Slavs took plenty of alcohol – it makes them too wobbly to run. The viticultural revival behind this was a Minorite monky business. Choose this mental illness and you can postpone all the fun you might have had in this life until the "next one". With brains softened and final destination assured it seems many in the region, for genetic and alcoholic reasons, just can’t wait to get there. These days our credulous country drunks follow a gung-ho pesticide tradition just to make sure.

SUZIE WENT AND LEFT US FOR SOME FOREIGN GUY

Go on and get it over with then: spend your one and only certifiable existence mooching around all your yesterdays and selfishly saving up for a comfortable eternity. We’re not waiting for the last laugh. We’ll have our laughs right now. Is that a Celestial Being, Widow Twankey? It’s behind you! Oh no it isn’t!

As the rank smell of burnt fat lingered in the warm November air, I wondered if I would die here. And in the unlikely event that I would inhabit one of these expensive looking family tombs, whether anyone would join me, either inside or outside.

Probably not. I will be undisturbed, like the Klingers. And about this I feel no more sentiment before, than I will afterwards.

As the faithful made the short journey from the supernatural to the supermarket car park across the road, I paused for a piss at the petrol station. Robbie Williams’ "Feel" was playing on the forecourt, its mock pop profundity a strange contrast to the mumbo-jumbo I had just witnessed, and yet NOT.

I scare myself to death,
That’s why I keep on running.
Before I’ve arrived, I can see myself coming.

It was a return from a truly fantastical "explanation" of existence to the reassuringly mundane reality of charcoal briquettes and damned big bags of Chappi dog food, although here too the candles were piled high.

That probably makes sense on Slovenia’s roads.

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