Scandal

What do we know for sure about Jonathan Petropoulos, Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, former head of CMC’s Centre for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, expert on Nazi art looting, and my colleague?

We know that he and a German partner located a Pissarro stolen by the Nazis and approached the Jewish owner asking for a cut of the sale price amounting to about 400,000$ to tell them where it was. We know that when the Jewish owner had her lawyer bring suit against the German partner (leaving Petropoulos alone because he was American) Petropoulos wrote emails to his partner saying “if [they] choose not to engage us, then we cannot say what will happen to the painting,” and “she needs us,” and “we… hold all the cards right now.” We know that, soon afterwards, the Pissarro was discovered by police in a vault belonging, through a trust, to a recently dead Nazi known to have been an art looter. We know that Petropoulos had met this Nazi many times, and was writing a book about him.

We also know that when the whole story threatened to break, Petropoulos went to his dean, who had a team of lawyers perform an investigation exonerating him. What, then, is his defense? The lawyers’ report has not been released, so some speculation is necessary, but it would appear from the evidence on hand that it rests on two points. First, it is common practice to charge an exorbitant “recovery fee” for looted art. Petropoulos was originally involved in the case as a freelance expert hired by the Art Loss Register, a for-profit London-based organization, which was intending to charge the owner of the Pissarro even more than was asked by Petropoulos and his partner – before Petropoulos and partner cut them out and went directly to the client with their own deal. Second, Petropoulos claims he didn’t know the Pissarro was in the Nazi’s vault. His partner knew it was in the vault of this man – this man with whom Petropoulos admits he, like his partner, had close association – but he himself had no knowledge of the piece’s whereabouts or new owner.

What we don’t know is how much truth there is in the second and crucial claim. Was Petropoulos fronting for a Nazi in the return of the Pissarro? Would the Nazi have received some of the recovery fee? Or were Petropoulos and his partner intending to betray the Nazi, to force him to give up the piece and take the money themselves? Or is it rather the case, as Petropoulos seems to suggest, that while his partner knew where the piece was, he himself was in the dark, that when he told the Jewish family that the new owner was a “foundation created by the heirs of the person who purchased [the painting] in 1957,” a foundation which wished to remain anonymous, he was speaking from a position of ignorance rather than the knowledge these words seem pregnant with? Was Petropoulos indeed satisfied not to know? Had he entered into a don’t-ask-don’t-tell bargain with his partner? Given his long association with the Nazi, it seems so unlikely as almost to be laughable. And yet even if it is true, what a sordid business! In the end his defense comes down to exactly that: he is a naïf, involved over his head in nastiness he couldn’t comprehend. He has resigned from his position as Director of the Genocide Centre not, he says, because he has done anything wrong but because the perception that he has done something wrong might reflect badly on the institution. His resignation lends even greater weight to the sub-heading of the story that broke the news on this side of the ocean: “Firm clears Petropoulos of wrongdoing; ethical questions remain.” They remain all right. And they stink up the house.

There is much of interest in this story. For instance that the reporter who broke the story in the US, writing the piece I’ve just mentioned and from which I glean all my information, was a CMC undergraduate, Elise Viebeck. Her article, appearing in a student newspaper, is now the main English news source on the matter; what is more, she appears to have done her own investigative reporting to work out the story. But for me the main thing, and the ugliest thing, is that I had no idea any of this had happened. It all took place a year ago but it was so well hushed up by CMC that no one on the Pomona campus – a campus that abuts CMC and is part of the same consortium — had any idea of any of it. My students have taken Petropoulos’s courses since this happened. I didn’t know to tell them about it, as nobody told me — until someone happened to mention last week how confused he was about how to approach this fellow he saw continually on his campus. And that we do not know the story means not only that we cannot use our resources – those of gossip and other social tools – to shun Petropoulos. It also means that there has been no call publicly to celebrate the remarkable Ms. Viebeck, whose stellar job reporting the story has been sacrificed to the whitewashing machine.

Read her story here. It’s well done.

Misc

A student writes at the beginning of her response paper that Aristotle’s Ethics is an instruction manual for a moral life.  At the end of the paper she writes that it is isn’t working very well as an instruction manual, as there are too many gaps.  It does not occur to her to use the second idea to challenge the first;  on the contrary, she sees in her juxtaposition a cohesiveness in focus.  What to me is the obvious next step — to ask if maybe the text is not an instructional manual — is not an obvious step for her.  In this she is typical of my students.  And I do not know how to correct them without saying what I believe:  that this way of reading bespeaks a character flaw.

I am planning a faculty resident event on Harry Potter, and have advertised quizzes and prizes.  This means I have to buy some prizes and, more interestingly, write some quizzes.  Eila and I are still devoting much of our time together to listening to the books on CD, now in the middle of our third time through the series, and I am noticing many repeated images.  For instance, in Books I, II, III, and IV, a bag splits open in the Hogwarts’ hallway.  It happens just once in each book, in different circumstances each time:  I forget whose bag in I, Harry’s in II, Hermione’s in III, Cedric’s in IV.  Does it also happen in Book V and Book VI?  I don’t know yet.

I’ll post the full quiz after the event.

My head space, catalogued in poetry

There are too many things to do.
The too many things to do are all individually meaningless.
I don’t know what the things to do are.
Other people who do know don’t care; but they want me to care with better doublethink than they need to show.
I want to do all these things better than anyone else.
I don’t want to do any of them.
I have things of my own I want to do.
I don’t know what those things are.
I don’t want to do those things either.
The things I have to do are preventing me from doing the things I want to do, or even knowing what those things are.
I care about (some) students and (some) colleagues and want them to care about me.
I can’t muster the energy to do anything about it.

This is mostly written by Z, in response to a request for a new analysis of my current malaise. It seems to be working. As is a gift from the same source: The Lost Tales of H.H. Munro, finally available in book form. Ya gotta laugh.

Boring, stupid

It hasn’t been that I’m too busy to blog.  It’s been that chairing is making me into a boring, stupid person who has no interest in anything real and whom I hate.

Not to say I’m not busy.  In fact, I’ve discovered the meaning of the word busy — it’s been one of my few insights this semester.  I used to wonder why people said “I’m too busy” to do something that would take two minutes.  Now I understand.  It’s because you have sixty two-minute tasks awaiting you as soon as your turn your mind to tasks.  In this state you don’t even prioritize.  You just do whatever’s in front of you until you stop and take some leisure, and then you go on.  Lots of small things just don’t get done.

Here’s something I’ve been looking for.  A piece on the fact that Canadian universities don’t hire their own graduates.  They want Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Oxbridge.  And, okay, sometimes UofT.  What this piece does not say is why, but that doesn’t take much brains.  They’re parochial, small minded, inferiority-complexed, resentful, and petty.

My 15 minutes lasted 15 seconds

Late at night

I have so much to say and no time to say it.  Everyone wants a piece of me.  Could someone please remind me why I agreed to be chair?  Oh yes!  I had no choice.  And as soon as my slightly junior colleague gets tenure — haw haw — it’s hers. Payback for those nice departmental letters.  Meanwhile, I pay for mine.

All I want to say now is boo hiss to anyone who is too snobby to admit that Puccini is the master.  Too crowd pleasing, they say.  Too sentimental.  What absolute rot!  I sit alone in the evenings, listening to Madame Butterfly, and I cannot get over it.  A world where this didn’t exist would be ridiculously poorer.

Mio My Son/ Brothers Lionheart

Of all the chapter books we read this summer, the strangest two were by Astrid Lindgren.

Lindgren wrote Mio My Son in 1955.  It involves what Freudians call a “family romance,” which means a child’s fantasy that his parents are imposters and that he has real (and likely royal) parents elsewhere, who will eventually come for him.  Apparently lots of children fantasize along these lines from time to time, but there are two ways to put it into a story.  One is to tell a story in which the hero leaves home and finds his real family, or his proper place in the world – a buildungsroman would be a loose example of a family romance especially if, as in Oliver Twist and many other novels, the hero does eventually find a rich relative.  The other is to tell a story in which the hero has the fantasy.  This is what Lindgren does in Mio My Son.  Except that we don’t actually find out until the last page.  We have hints of it, yes.  But it’s not until the final paragraph that we know for certain that the boy has been sitting the whole time on a bench in the park, unwilling to go home to his truly awful life.

“Perhaps that’s where [Aunt Hulda] thinks I am, watching the houses where there are lights in the windows and children are having supper with their mummies and daddies.  And I suppose she’s cross because I’m so long coming home with those buns.  But Aunt Hulda is wrong!  She’s absolutely wrong!  There’s no Andy on any seat in the park.  He’s in Farawayland, you see.  He is in Farawayland, I tell you. He’s in a place where the silver poplars rustle… where the fires glow warm at night… where there is Bread that Satisfies Hunger… and where he has his father the King who loves him and whom he loves.  That’s how it is.  Karl Anders Nilsson is in Farawayland with his father the King, and all is well with Mio.“

It was heartbreaking, for me, though Eila didn’t notice;  she was still caught up in the real story, which is excellent though also a wee bit sappy and the-stars-are-god’s-daisy-chain-ish.

Then, twenty years later, in 1975, Lindgren decided to do it over again and produced The Brothers Lionheart.  In many ways it’s a better book.  The adventure, though pretty much exactly the same, is more exciting, and all the sappiness is expunged for a hard-hitting, forthright tale of danger and honour.  But here’s the thing.  The new book is the other kind of family romance.  The boys (there are two this time) really are there, really having the adventure.  And why?  Because they are dead!  They have died in our world, and gone to Nangiyala, which is a lot like Farawayland only real.  It still works for readers as a family romance, only now it has a religious overtone:  Nangiyala is some sort of heaven.

For all I liked Brothers Lionheart, I can’t help thinking that Lindgren got mixed up somehow.  I don’t think you can fight evil tyrants after you die.  I don’t think you can die after you die.  I think she’s been misled by a religious allegiance to pretend to a concreteness that can only serve to confuse.

Identity and morality

I present Eila with a couple of those little philosophical problems involving identity.  “The philosopher breaks the handle of his axe,” I tell her, “and replaces it.  A few years later he breaks the blade and replaces that.  Is it still the same axe?”  Eila says, without a moment’s thought:  “no.”  “Theseus has a ship,” I say.  “We’ll call it The Ship of Theseus.  Over the years, he replaces each plank, throwing the old planks overboard.  They all wash up on an island where a master ship-builder is marooned.  Once the master ship-builder’s got them all, he builds a ship in which each plank ends up in exactly the same spot it held in the original, and sails away.  Who is now sailing The Ship of Theseus?”  She answers immediately: “the master ship-builder.”

She’s consistent, eh?  And she has a proclivity for the consistency of things.  Not to mention their materiality:  a thing is the sum of its material parts.  Lots of good common sense there.

On a roll, I decided to try her on the problem of Heinz.  Heinz’s wife is sick, and needs 1000$ for medicine, but they don’t have any money and the druggist refuses to sell it for a lower price.  Does he steal the drug?  According the Carol Gilligan, boys faced with this puzzle play by the rules, arguing either yes or no, while girls refuse to play by the rules and seek other solutions.  After her answers to the other two puzzles I thought Eila would be decisive and boy-ish.  But she took her time, and finally suggested that the people at the bank probably had a lot of money and should be made to give some to Heinz.  Very girlish, and nicely philosophical.

Wha?

Where did the summer go? I was just getting set to blog on how baggage handlers stole 150$ worth of plamobil from my suitcase on the way to Canada — more fool me for putting it in a ziplock bag — when I see it’s time to start packing to go back to California. Maybe it’s because it rained the whole summer. Time passes strangely in the rain. I always feel like I’m waiting for something.

Whatever it is, I’ve certainly been a little out-of-it the past few weeks. This morning, for instance, I got to the supermarket, pulled out my list, and noticed that one of the five items I’d written down to buy was “shopping.”

Evil doers should read more children’s books

There’s a sweet little line somewhere in Harry VII when Dumbledore, instead of telling us once again that Voldemort never saw the importance of love, tells us that he never saw the importance of children’s stories.  Dumbledore explains:  had Voldemort read the Tales of Beedle the Bard, he would have sought immortality through the Hallows, a much healthier route than Horcruxes.  The underlying message is that children’s books teach us how to live well, and I agree, even if I’m a little dubious of JKR’s conviction that teaching us how to live well involves making us think a lot about eternal life or life after death.  In any case, her little plug for the genre in which she herself writes is charming.

I’ve just finished the much touted Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart.  It was also sweet in its way, and I’ll admit I found it hard to put down, but I’m afraid it was awfully formulaic.  Like Jenny Nimmo’s Charlie Bone series, it aims to appeal to Potter fans with fast-paced action set in a school for children of exceptional abilities, the difference being that in Benedict and in Bone, unlike in Harry, the schools (the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened and Bloor’s Academy, respectively) are brainwashing prison-camps fronting for Evil, and the children have to subvert or destroy the schools to beat the bad.  In Bone the bad is magical;  in Benedict it is technological – the villain, Ledroptha Curtain (Iron Curtain maybe?), is trying to take over the world using subliminal messages delivered in children’s voices filtered through a machine called ‘the Whisperer.’

Which leads me to back to Dumbledore’s advice to super-villains:  do your reading!  Had Ledroptha Curtain read Charlie Bone he would know that a school for children with exceptional abilities is a bad front for evil because the children Have Exceptional Abilities (duh!) and therefore three or four of them can put their heads together and defeat you.  And only slightly more cultural awareness – say, of Spy Kids, or Pinky and the Brain – would have told him that the old subliminal message gag fails every time.  Sweet, like I said.  But also boring.