“…When he died, … he did so with an afro.”

The fascist who 'passed' for white

Lawrence Dennis was a leading light in the American fascist movement of the 1930s. He was a fan of Hitler and a self-avowed anti-semite. Now a new book reveals that he was actually black - although even his wife didn't know. Gary Younge reports

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/history/story/0,,2049753,00.html

The fascist who 'passed' for white

Lawrence Dennis was a leading light in the American fascist movement of the 1930s. He was a fan of Hitler and a self-avowed anti-semite. Now a new book reveals that he was actually black - although even his wife didn't know. Gary Younge reports

Wednesday April 4, 2007

The Guardian

Lawrence Dennis was, arguably, the brains behind American fascism. He attended the Nuremberg rallies, had a personal audience with Mussolini, and met Nazi leaders; throughout the 1930s he provided the intellectual ballast for America's bourgeoning pro-fascist movement. But though his work was well known and well appreciated by the intelligentsia and political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, there was one crucial fact about him that has never emerged until now: he was black.

It turns out that the man Life magazine once described as "America's number one intellectual fascist" was, in fact, a light-skinned African American, born in the segregated South - although he "passed" for white among the greatest race hatemongers known to mankind. In a new book, The Colour of Fascism, Gerald Horne reveals how Dennis managed to live a lie for his entire adult life. "It's not clear that his wife knew that he was black," says Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston. "He certainly never told his daughter. When she asked him, he would just smile enigmatically."

Dennis was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1893 just as racial segregation had fully reasserted its authority on the South in the wake of the civil war. His mother was African American, as is clear from pictures; his father's race is not known. As a boy he was a famous child preacher, spreading the gospel first among black American congregations and then later abroad, even in Britain. But at some point in his adolescence, he did something quite dramatic: he cut all ties with his family so that he could attend the prestigious school of Exeter, and then Harvard, as a white man. After that he briefly pursued a career as a diplomat and broker, and then in the wake of the Wall Street Crash went on to become the public face of American fascism. None of these jobs would have been open to him had it been known he was black.

"Passing" was common in American society at the time. Despite laws against miscegenation, the pervasive practice of masters raping their slaves had produced a large number of light-skinned people. Under America's rigidly enforced codes of racial supremacy, any child of a mixed-race relationship was deemed "black", regardless of their complexion. They called it the one-drop rule: one drop of "black blood" made you black.

Given the manifest benefits of life on the other side of the colour line, black people who could pass as white often did, even though doing so meant cutting themselves off from their family and their past. Passing has provided the dramatic tension for many a novel, including Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Walter Moseley's Devil in a Blue Dress and, most pertinently, Nella Larsen's Passing. "Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear," Walter White, the former head of the civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, claimed in the late 1940s. "People whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration ... men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the proscription and humiliation which the American colour line imposes on them." White, who was light-skinned, used to pass himself as white at times when investigating lynch mobs in the South.

Interestingly, Dennis was dark enough to make most people look twice. The Nazi sympathiser and pilot Charles Lindbergh suspected that some of Dennis's "ancestors ... might have come from the near east". Lindbergh's wife Anne referred to Dennis's "bronzed" skin. A New York Times report in 1927 outlined Dennis's "close-cropped bristly hair and [skin] deeply bronzed by the tropical sun". A leftwing newspaper mentioned "the tall, swarthy prophet of 'intellectual fascism' ".

"Some suspected and others knew," says Horne. "But there was a don't-ask-don't-tell policy in place at the time for those on the borders of the colour line. One could perform whiteness to some degree, and that is precisely what Dennis did. His conservative politics also insulated him from a lot of further inquiry."

Years later, when he was forced to defend himself against charges of being a Nazi collaborator in a high-profile trial, one onlooker is recorded as saying that she was "puzzled and apprehensive over the fact that in nothing which I have read about Lawrence Dennis has mention been made that he is the son of a Negro mother. This fact was known to thousands, at least up to his 16th year when I knew him."

But while most people were, it seems, certain that he was no Wasp, no one seems to have had the audacity to suggest publicly that he was black either. And among the black community there was such a widespread awareness of passing that "outing" someone was considered a particularly vengeful act. "Black people then would have been very protective of his secret in a way I think they would not be now," says Horne. "He was like a slave who had escaped the plantation."

In any case, Dennis was not your run-of-the-mill fascist. He described fascism not so much as an ideology he favoured but simply as the inevitable consequence of America's political trajectory. "I took what was then considered a pro-facist view," Dennis explained in his later years. "I said that Hitler and Mussolini were rising to meet the economic crisis and that we would have to do much the same thing ... I defended them and tried to explain them; and that [brought] me under considerable criticism and attack as being a fascist ... I said the United States will have to go fascist in the same way that Germany and Italy have gone."

Dennis had in fact gone further, while still hiding behind the smokescreen of objectivity. "When analysed simply on the basis of historical fact, [Hitler] is not only the greatest political genius since Napoleon but also the most rational," he once said.

Dennis's views gained particular currency in the late 1930s as a significant portion of the US rallied against America joining the war and he launched into his most prominent period as a forthright isolationist.

Horne describes Dennis's position as both cynical and logical. "Well, you could see why he would think it was inevitable," he says. "Fascism was a far greater threat to the US than communism ever was. Dennis had no faith in the white working class. So if you believe it's going to happen you have one of two choices. You can fight against it or you can ride the wave. He decided to ride the wave and that was hard-boiled cynicism and coldly calculating."

Dennis was a prickly, arrogant character who never seemed to be happier than when he was slating the intellects of others and making references to his own superiority. In an interview with the author John Roy Carlson, he was asked about a series of congressmen with whom he was acquainted. For each one he would just say: "Dumb. No brains." The influential publisher of the Chicago Tribune company? "Dumb. No brains." On a trip to Germany he met Rudolph Hess, whom he regarded as "more of an intellectual than the others", meaning Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels.

Dennis was undoubtedly antisemitic - "I am no friend of the Jews," he once wrote - but his antisemitism was no more pronounced than that of most Wasps in the US at the time and less severe than that of the Nazis. "Hitler says the Jew cannot be a citizen of Germany. I consider that position to be unsound nationalism," he said. "As for any persecution or organized violence against Jews in this country, I consider it unthinkable."

Not surprisingly, perhaps, his racial politics were the most peculiar. He kept company with some of the most extreme white supremacists of his day, but despite the views of most of his friends and backers, Dennis managed both to champion fascism and subtly to maintain a distance from racist polemic.

While in Berlin, he asked Karl Boemer of Hitler's Propaganda Ministry: "Why don't you treat the Jews more or less as we treat the Negroes in America? You can practice discrimination and all that, but be a little hypocritical and moderate and do not get in conflict with American opinion." As the years went on he opposed segregation, branding the "the case against integration in the schools" as one "based on odious comparisons".

In retrospect, given his status as a black man in white drag writing for the hard right, his constant references to race in America seem reckless. "He was like an arsonist who simply could not resist returning to the scene of a crime," says Horne. But in the end it was the law rather than his race that would come into conflict with his rightwing views. For, as the war was winding down, Dennis found himself on trial for sedition; he was one of 29 defendants charged with undermining the morale of the armed forces. They were accused of being part of some kind of worldwide Nazi conspiracy. (Horne describes the trial as a farcical attempt to "frame a guilty man".)

The case collapsed after the judge had a fatal heart attack. But Dennis's world was also collapsing. Friends and financial supporters distanced themselves from him. His wife, Eleanor, who had worked as both housekeeper and secretary to his one-man intellectual operation, filed for divorce in 1956. Dennis's arrogance, it seems, had been as prominent in his personal life as in his professional life. "It is just hard to believe Eleanor can be so mad," he wrote to a friend. "What jolts me is that over 62 years in which I had lots of affairs and nearly a dozen women one time or another who seriously wanted to marry ... I never had a single one turn on me. I could meet and exchange fond memories with every one of them. This is the first time a woman ever turned on me."

Their two daughters, Emily and Laura, studied at top colleges before graduating into good marriages even as their father's fortunes declined. After his divorce, with no extended family - he had had to bid farewell to them years ago in order to pass as white - he was on his own. With subscriptions to his newsletter drying up and the cold-war era dismissive of his politics, he struggled to pay his way with bits of writing and the occasional lecture. He did marry again, though, and after his second wife died he moved in with daughter Laura.

In what may have been his most audacious act of defiance, or evidence that he had finally given up the pretence, he eventually let his hair grow out. When he died, in obscurity, in 1977, he did so with an afro.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1142027,00.html

Hitler's debt to America

The Nazis' extermination programme was carried out in the name of eugenics - but they were by no means the only advocates of racial purification. In this extract from his extraordinary new book, Edwin Black describes how Adolf Hitler's race hatred was underpinned by the work of American eugenicists

Friday February 6, 2004

The Guardian

At 4am on November 12 1915, a woman named Anna Bollinger gave birth at the German-American Hospital in Chicago. The baby was somewhat deformed and suffered from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities, as well as other complications. The delivering physicians awakened Dr Harry Haiselden, the hospital's chief of staff. Haiselden came in at once. He consulted with colleagues. There was great disagreement over whether the child could be saved. But Haiselden decided the baby was too afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. It would be killed. The method: denial of treatment.

Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of Bollinger's, heard the news and sped to the hospital to help. She found the baby, who had been named Allan, alone in a bare room. Walsh pleaded with Haiselden not to kill the baby by withholding treatment. "It was not a monster - that child," Walsh later told an inquest. "It was a beautiful baby. I saw no deformities." Walsh had patted the infant lightly. Allan's eyes were open, and he waved his tiny fists at her. Begging the doctor once more, Walsh tried an appeal to his humanity. "If the poor little darling has one chance in a thousand," she pleaded, "won't you operate to save it?" Haiselden laughed at Walsh, retorting, "I'm afraid it might get well." He was a skilled and experienced surgeon, trained by the best doctors in Chicago. He was also an ardent eugenicist. Allan Bollinger duly died. An inquest was convened a few days later. Haiselden defiantly declared, "I should have been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child's life. My crime would have been keeping in existence one of nature's cruellest blunders." A juror shot back, "What do you mean by that?" Haiselden responded, "Exactly that. I do not think this child would have grown up to be a mental defective. I know it."

After tempestuous proceedings, the inquest ruled: "We believe that a prompt operation would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the child. We find no evidence from the physical defects that the child would have become mentally or morally defective." But they also decided that Haiselden was within his professional rights to decline treatment. No law compelled him to operate on the child. He was released unpunished, and efforts by the Illinois attorney general to indict him for murder were blocked by the local prosecutor. The doctor considered his legal vindication a powerful victory for eugenics. "Eugenics? Of course it's eugenics," he told one reporter.

Haiselden became an overnight celebrity, known for his many newspaper articles, his speaking tours and outrageous diatribes. In 1917, Hollywood came calling. The film was called The Black Stork. Written by Jack Lait, a reporter on the Chicago American, it was produced in Hollywood and given a massive national distribution and promotion campaign. Haiselden played himself in a fictionalised account of a eugenically mismatched couple whom he advises not to have children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually, the woman does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die. The dead child levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ. It was unbridled cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement; the film played at movie theatres around the country for more than a decade.

National publicity advertised it as a "eugenic love story". One advertisement quoted Swiss eugenicist Auguste Forel's warning: "The law of heredity winds like a red thread through the family history of every criminal, of every epileptic, eccentric and insane person. Shall we sit still ... without applying the remedy?" In 1917, a display advertisement for The Black Stork read: "Kill Defectives, Save the Nation and See 'The Black Stork'." Various methods of eugenic euthanasia - including gassing the unwanted in lethal chambers - were a part of everyday American parlance and ethical debate some two decades before Nevada approved the first such chamber for criminal executions in 1921.

As America's eugenics movement gathered pace, it inspired a host of imitators. In France, Belgium, Sweden, England and elsewhere in Europe, cliques of eugenicists did their best to introduce eugenic principles into national life; they could always point to recent precedents established in the United States.

Germany was no exception. From the turn of the century, German eugenicists formed academic and personal relationships with the American eugenics establishment, in particular with Charles Davenport, the pioneering founder of the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, New York, which was backed by the Harriman railway fortune. A number of other charitable American bodies generously funded German race biology with hundreds of thousands of dollars, even after the depression had taken hold.

Germany had certainly developed its own body of eugenic knowledge and library of publications. Yet German readers still closely followed American eugenic accomplishments as the model: biological courts, forced sterilisation, detention for the socially inadequate, debates on euthanasia. As America's elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as "bacteria," "vermin," "mongrels" and "subhuman", a superior race of Nordics was increasingly seen as the answer to the globe's eugenic problems. US laws, eugenic investigations and ideology became blueprints for Germany's rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers.

One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action. While there, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American ethnological stalwarts. And he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its "corruption" by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail.

In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote: "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilisation of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race."

One day in the early 1930s, Whitney visited Grant to show off a letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race. The fan letter called Grant's book "his Bible". The man who sent those letters was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler displayed his knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. In Mein Kampf, for example, he declared: "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole."

Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State."

Hitler proudly told his comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. "Now that we know the laws of heredity," he told a fellow Nazi, "it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Nor did Hitler fail to grasp the eugenic potential of gas and the lethal chamber, a topic that was already being discussed in German eugenic circles before Mein Kampf was published. Hitler, who had himself been hospitalised for battlefield gas injuries, wrote: "If at the beginning of the war and during the war 12,000 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our best German workers in the field, the sacrifices of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: 12,000 scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future."

On January 30 1933, Hitler seized power. During the 12-year Reich, he never varied from the eugenic doctrines of identification, segregation, sterilisation, euthanasia, eugenic courts and eventually mass termination in lethal chambers. During the Reich's first 10 years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfilment of their own decades of research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilising hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilisation act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

Most of all, American raceologists were proud to have inspired the strictly eugenic state the Nazis were constructing. In those early years of the Third Reich, Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modelled on laws already introduced across America and upheld by the supreme court. Nazi doctors, and even Hitler himself, regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the US. American eugenicists were eager to assist.

This was particularly true of California's eugenicists, who led the nation in sterilisation and provided the most scientific support for Hitler's regime. In 1934, as Germany's sterilisations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenic leader and immigration activist CM Goethe was ebullient in congratulating ES Gosney of the San Diego-based Human Betterment Foundation for his impact on Hitler's work. Upon his return in 1934 from a eugenic fact-finding mission in Germany, Goethe wrote Gosney a letter of praise. The foundation was so proud of Goethe's letter that they reprinted it in their 1935 annual report.

"You will be interested to know," Goethe's letter proclaimed, "that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the intellectuals behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation.

"I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

· Extracted from War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black, published by Turnaround, price £17.99. To order a copy for £15.99 plus p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Edwin Black is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, IBM and the Holocaust.

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Mmmm. ¿’Tonz algunos de los fachos WASPs no lo eran tanto? El otro día también lo escuchaba en una plática con un cuate, los más recalcitrantes e intolerantes racistas en Méjico llevan sangre no tan PURA en sus venas.

Alas, pus yo esperaría entonces que esos que son muy acá, de la destra radicale, chanza sólo están fingiendo pa’ avanzar las propuestas más izquierdosas de todo el espectro politico. Great!!! ¡Haberlo dicho antes! Aquí me tienen dando lo mejor de mi, que no es mucho por cierto, mientras ustedes tienen el masterplan bien “aceitadito”. Je, je, je.

M@rcold blooded.

Norwich, U(na) K(GB)

6/04/07

P.D.Mosquetera. Todos contra uno y uno contraaa … pus una nomás. Yo prefiero el One on One; no se me da el sexo tumultuario, la neta.

P.D.Malinchista. La Marina ha re-encarnado.

P.D.Chancha. La Guerra Puerca está presta a reciclarse.

P.D. Hermética. "...sell your soul/keep your shell..." - Crossroads (Tracy Chapman).

P.D.arreglada. A veces se gana, a veces se pierde, a veces, ... a veces, ... mmmm, pus se prepara el resultado.

21 de Agosto de 1994, la paisana, pernoctando en Tasqueña, Avila Camacho, una zapatería en Tepito, una labia convincente, las Marilus, el registro, el Hotel España, la Astudillo, divorciada, el juanjoché, Doña Pene, el "tiroloco McGraw", la Chiapaneca, Acapatzingo, 16 de septiembre, La Peni, la casa de Maximiliano, la academia de policía, el barranco, la alberca, Citlalli, las gorditas en el Mercado, Tepoz, un club de Golf que no VA, Las Lagunas de Zempoala, Huitzilac, La Chica Prodigio, Los Cucos, Silvia "La Piernona", El "Perrote", El "Tobi", Don Pacorro, Don Casca, Tarianes, La Holanda, BASF, CIVAC, Los Acorazados, Rinconada Las Palmas, Un Tlacuachote, El Batoclós, Don Gelatino, Candy, El Matasiete, Altavista, La Carolina, La CTM, La 19, La Selva, Casa de Piedra, Avenida Juárez, el cine Morelos, la autopista, la UAEM, Oscar, Teopanzolco, el "Coruco" Díaz, Una cena en el barco, el Ficho, El Monsi en el Borda, El Vivaldi, La 3 de Mayo, Zapata, Lupita "La Bruja", Nancy, unas reuniones "matutinas", Hilda, El George, Los Sesma, El Pastrana, Vicky, La Primera dedicatoria en una tesis, una cátedra universitaria, la "mantecola", un choque espectacular, muchos centros de investigación, Las estacas, Casablanca, el carro rojo, el Alex, una tesis apresurada, refacciones importadas, Satelite, el primer sobrino, un chop suey, momiyi, una gran colección de discos, la trova, unos firmes muslos, unos turgentes pechos, pelo de cocker, una carga insoportable, un trío improbable, la camarona, el winnie puh, una división imbécil, una fiesta de bienvenida, un terremoto desapercibido, una poli coqueta, una credencial indispensable, un pozolito en Pogreso, las patrullas, el Nessy, un ataque cardiaco, un ahorcado, un comedor espacioso, un power mac, lady Laura, el final de una comedia, unos celos irracionales, el Mike, un servicio social, una escalada con cangurera, una cena en Humboldt, unos examenes de casa desgastantes, varios viajes a CU, la novena en Bellas Artes, Portales, Ofelia Medina

desayunando, un Huipil, wanzontles capeados, una alcantarillada, la chica Freud, Gladys Creta, la plaza de la solidaridad, tramitando una placas, un shadow café, una chinche besucona, muchos vinagrillos, mezcal adulterado, una gringa en Anenecuilco, un mirador en la pera, alejado del fut, una boda en Jojutla, una caja de Don Pedro, una cartera de piel, una operación necesaria, un oído reventado, Vero manita, una lavandería automática, una colcha puerquísima, un curso sobre UNIX, el gran JOE, unos jumiles, Xochicalco, una labradora atrabancada, un amor compartido, un improbable Casanova, una traición involuntaria, el primer compló, los MIEFOS,

la Tigresa, una Hungara, un par de Polacos, un Franchute, una preciosa Venezolana, una entrega TOTAL, unas cartas reveladoras, unos esbozos a lápiz, una mirada infinita, una dulce llamada, un golazazo de Zidane, una final en Yokohama, dormitando en carretera, un examen profesional, Juan José Arreola, Elena Garro, Rius, avenida INSURGENTES, …Don Goyo.

... Noriega, Duvalier, Hussein, ... who's next?

Brilliantly boring


A website that shows a large piece of cheese as it (very slowly) matures is getting thousands of hits a day. What is it about dull- as-ditchwater webcam footage that can be so strangely gripping? Oliver Burkeman dissects the cult of banality on the net while Alexandra Topping picks some of the classics of the genre



http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/0,,178327,00.html

Brilliantly boring


A website that shows a large piece of cheese as it (very slowly) matures is getting thousands of hits a day. What is it about dull- as-ditchwater webcam footage that can be so strangely gripping? Oliver Burkeman dissects the cult of banality on the net while Alexandra Topping picks some of the classics of the genre

Tuesday April 3, 2007
The Guardian

Something strange and slightly troubling begins to happen when you spend more than about two minutes watching Cheddarvision, the much-publicised website set up by the cheesemaker Tom Calver, which broadcasts live footage of a single 44lb truckle of cheddar as it imperceptibly matures. First, unsurprisingly, you feel bored and irritable. Then, after a while, and without really meaning to, you slip into a peaceful, meditative, quasi-hypnotic state. You start to breathe more deeply. Peripheral distractions - traffic noise, ringing telephones - fall away. There is you, and there is the cheese. Nothing more. If something should actually happen to the cheese while you're in this state of mind - every week, the cheese is turned over; on one occasion, the label fell off and had to be replaced - it has an impact utterly disproportionate to the event. It is inexplicably hilarious; astonishing; gasp-inducing. Then the drama subsides, and once again, it's just you and the cheese - and, depending on the time of day, perhaps tens of thousands of other people, scattered across the planet, for whom no other concern is more pressing in their lives, right at this very moment, than to stare at cheddar.

It is generally agreed that we are more bored today than ever before. Some surveys put the percentage of people who yearn for more novelty in their lives at around 70% and rising. As the scholar Lars Svendsen explains in his book, A Philosophy of Boredom, until at least the 17th century being bored was an elite privilege, bragged about by princes and the nobility. The paradox is that boredom seems to have become democratised in exact proportion to the explosion of reasons not to be bored: books, affordable international travel, and the mass media, for a start. And here is an even stranger paradox: in the age of the internet, when the average person has access to vastly more genuinely fascinating information than at any point in history, what are the sites that consistently achieve cult status, from the birth of the web up to the present day? The boring ones. A ripening cheese. A coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab (the first webcam, and now a dusty artefact of online history). A camera trained on a street in a Scottish village where nothing ever happens. And I do mean nothing: so little, in fact, that it would be more interesting to watch paint dry - which, incidentally, you can also do via the web, at watching-paint-dry.com.
Some incredibly boring websites, it's true, hold the promise of sporadic but genuine excitement - a webcam trained on the US-Mexican border might conceivably show an immigrant crossing it illegally; the webcam trained on Mount St Helens might show it erupting. Even the Virtual Holmfirth webcam, positioned to broadcast a live view of events taking place on the pavement between Sid's Cafe and the parish church, might catch a West Yorkshire youth engaged in antisocial behaviour. (If that ever happened, by the way, we would probably identify the epidemic of boredom as the cause of the antisocial behaviour.)

Just as frequently, though, boredom seems to be the very point of a boring website - as if we truly appreciate the quiet, uncomplicated space of a few moments spent watching, say, a nest full of eagle eggs that are not going to be hatching any time soon. Suddenly, it becomes a little easier to understand why people go trainspotting.

Steven Johnson, in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, advances the thesis that our attention spans are actually getting longer, and that popular culture is making us smarter. Feature films, he points out, last longer than they ever did. Computer games, along with many TV drama series, require far more sustained cognitive engagement than was needed in the purported golden age of childhood. Is it possible that we are becoming more patient, too? After all, which is the truly more shocking thing about Channel 4's Big Brother: that it becomes a freakshow of racism and psychological dysfunction when condensed into a half-hour broadcast? Or that there is actually a market, however small by comparison, for hour after unbroken hour of footage from the Big Brother house, broadcast on the digital channel E4, where absolutely nothing occurs? In an information-saturated society, writes the sociologist Orrin Klapp, "we suffer a lag, in which the slow horse of meaning is unable to keep up with the fast horse of mere information". It would be nice to believe dull websites are popular because they are a rebellion against overload - a space for our slow horses to graze.

Except for one problem. The truth is that we all know how the web exerts a mesmerising power of distraction, somehow absorbing our boredom without really curing it. This is what we mean when we say that web-surfing is addictive. Big Brother has this effect, too: you don't feel bored while you're watching it, but afterwards, you still wish you hadn't. The fact that you just spent 10 minutes staring at a decomposing compost heap - as you could, until recently, at a website operated from the Sussex village of Horsted Keynes - does not automatically mean that you really wanted to, nor that it was good for you to do so. True, it's possible that you watched the compost decompose with a deep appreciation for the ever-advancing natural cycles of life and death. Then again, maybe you were just bored. Maybe you had spent half the morning staring listlessly at your computer screen, and were desperate for any novelty - even the novelty of someone putting something so incredibly dull on the internet.

I could go on. But it would only get boring. And besides, I have a cheese to watch.

The Trojan Room coffee pot

Started 1991, although it only went global in 1993 (before that it was confined to Cambridge University's local computer network).

Finished August 2001 (after which the by-then-famous coffee pot was auctioned online for pounds 3,350).

The story The Trojan Room coffee pot is thought to be the world's first webcam. In the days before the world wide web, Cambridge academics had the idea of training a camera on the department coffee machine to help people avoid making pointless trips to the machine before the coffee was ready. When the coffee pot eventually made it on to the web, hundreds of thousands logged on for a look. "It became famous for being famous," said Quentin Stafford-Fraser, one of the original developers.

JenniCam

Started April 1996.

Finished December 2003.

Number of hits At the height of its popularity, JenniCam attracted an estimated 3 to 4 million people a day.

The story Long, long before Justin Kan was making the news with the 24/7 webcam of his life (justin.tv), American student Jennifer Ringley was doing exactly the same thing, albeit on a much smaller budget, from her college dorm in Pennsylvania. Generally, it was very, very boring, but sometimes Jennifer, who was 19 when she started broadcasting, did things like have sex. Or strip for the camera. The ethics of all this were much debated. Was it voyeurism? Hi-tech post feminism? (This was a long time ago, remember, in internet terms.) She went on the David Letterman show to chew it over. Later she charged for access to the site; in the end it closed down because of problems over nudity and the online payment service she was using.

Mount St Helens VolcanoCam

Started 1996.

The story One of the first webcams to be pointed at an active volcano. Mount St Helens notoriously erupted in 1980 with a blast equal in power to 500 atom bombs, and has been in continuous eruption since reawaking in 2004. The picture is updated every five minutes, and, weather and light conditions allowing, you get a nice view of the volcano from an observatory about five miles away from the action. From September 2004 to March 2005, the website received more than 342m hits, averaging 1.8m a day.

How to find it VolcanoCam

Big Brother webcam

Started 2000.

Finished It keeps finishing, but then it starts all over again ...

The story Back when Big Brother was an exciting, newfangled thing, few seriously believed that viewers would keep logging on to webcam footage when the TV show was over. Especially as the technology then was plain rubbish. But how wrong we were ... Web footage of the inside of Big Brother houses used to be free; these days, you have to pay for it. Part of the thrill, if it can be called that, is that sometimes stuff happens that is too revolting to be shown on TV.

Eaglecam

Started September 2004.

Finished May 2006.

The story There are many webcams trained on eagle nests. Generally speaking, they are of niche interest. Last year, for reasons that may never be fully understood, one abruptly rose to international prominence. An estimated 10 million people a day began logging on to follow the fortunes of a pair of bald eagles in an accountant's backyard on Hornby Island, near Vancouver, Canada. The birds were there, or they weren't. They preened, or didn't. Would the eggs hatch? No. They, allegedly, were eventually smashed and eaten by their parents. Bird lovers everywhere mourned.

Hencam

Started Summer 2005.

Number of hits so far More than 470,000.

The story They cluck, they peck and, sometimes, they lay eggs. Hen-owner Neil Whitaker says that the idea to chronicle the lives of his three birds, Milly, Tilly and Penny, came to him when he was chatting with friends in the pub. You may or may not be pleased to hear that the Bradford-based chickens have laid 49 eggs between them so far this year. When the Guardian logged on yesterday, Penny and Tilly appeared to be eating something from the earthy floor of what looked like a chicken coop. Milly's feathery bottom could be seen in the background. "I can't honestly believe so many people would want to sit around and watch hens," says Whitaker. But there it is.

How to find it hencam.co.uk

Texas Border Watch

Started October 2006.

Finished November 2006.

The story For one month only, scores of webcams provided live footage of the 1,240-mile-long Texas/Mexico border. The idea was that the public would email or call the Texan authorities if they saw anyone attempting anything that looked like an illegal border crossing (out of Mexico, into Texas, to clarify). The trial was a huge success. More than 25m hits were recorded on the website, and more than 200,000 people subscribed: thousands of emails resulted. The site is currently closed, but the state now plans to open a full-time webcam public surveillance operation. As Texas Governor Rick Perry put it, "A stronger border is what Americans want and it's what our security demands and that is what Texas is going to deliver."

Wildcamgrizzlies

Finished August 2006, but highlights can still be seen on the National Geographic website.

The story This grizzly bear webcam was a smash hit last year. Like all the classics of its genre, there was sometimes nothing doing. A bear sitting doing nothing, say. Or no bears at all. Other times, though, you got to watch bears frolicking and catching salmon in the McNeil river in Alaska. The camera was hidden in a fake boulder on the riverbank, allowing viewers to get a uniquely close-up, fear-free, view of the bears. As one blogger wrote at the height of the webcam's popularity: "A smaller bear than last night has been feasting since about 5pm EST. This is really fascinating. I look forward to seeing more of them. The large male last night was awesome."

How to find it wildcamafrica/

Cheddar Vision

Started January 2007.

Number of hits so far 803,414.

The story The new undisputed king of the boring webcam. Since going live 102 days ago, more than 800,000 people have logged on to watch a piece of West Country cheddar mature. Highlights have included someone putting a sticker on the piece of cheese, and the sticker almost falling off. If you go to the cheese's webcam site, you will find directions to YouTube, where you can see a time-lapse film of its first three months of life. The cheese, which also has its own MySpace site (where it has more than 500 friends) will be auctioned off for charity when it reaches full maturity.

How to find it: cheddarvision.tv/

The Neilston webcam

The sell "Probably still the most boring webcam on the net!" Or so it says on the frontpage of the website.

The story Someone has put up a webcam on a suburban street in Neilston, a village of 6,000 people 12 miles south-west of Glasgow. It is updated at regular intervals throughout the day. When the Guardian logged on yesterday, it looked quite sunny there, but there was no one in shot. All you could really see was some road, and a bit of someone's driveway. As far as cult webcams go, this is still very much a new kid on the block, but its popularity is growing fast. At least 106,529 other visitors have also been bored by this page, it boasted yesterday.

How to find it neilstonwebcam/



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Perdonen sus Mercedes, no es que me haya olvidado de ustedes, pero estoy muy ocupado. Estoy escribiendo mis conclusiones y les paso el chisme que, seguro sí voy a Estocolmo (y no porque padezca el síndrome ese), chidos resultados, very chiros.

Pues, el leiv motif de este post ya lo habíamos abordado. Apenas lo descubren en el Guardian. Je, je, je. Van detrás de las vanguardias, compas. Eso los zapatos y sus seguidores (críticos, verdaderamente una piedra en el zapato) lo hemos sabido dendenantes: hay que desviar la mirada, y más que todo el juicio en cosas banales, de modo que no se dedique tiempo alguno a la reflexión, y mucho menos a la acción. ¡Dios me libre! Anatema.

Por ello, hay que bombardear al popolo con noticias insustanciales hasta el asqueo. Que si la Britney ya salió del Madhouse, que si la Salma (muy mala actorcita, btw; la única que desentona en el Callejón de los Milagros) está embarazada, que si el Cuauh deja a las wilas, etc., etc., etc. Peor, ahora que se ha descubierto que mi cuate el Diego tiene hepatitis, se aborda todo lo superficial y se deja de lado eso por lo que se ganó mi respeto, que es su tardío compromiso social. Por cierto, el mejor jugador de todos los tiempos es Pelé. Mucho más completo que el Diego, lamentablemente el no anotó el gol más hermoso de todos los tiempos, un verdadero poema futbolístico sobre el césped del Azteca, ¿o Guillermo Cañedo?

Ya para terminar, y como muestra del nivel en que todo se ha banalizado al extremo: ¿Recuerdan que creo fué hace dos años el climax del código Da Vinci? Pues, creo que nadie lo definió mejor que el Mario Vargas Llosa (todavía no le dan el nobel, no se vayan con la finta. Pero no se pierdan leer: La ciudad y los PERROS.) que calificó al “Código Da Vinci” como “literatura light”. Ese Dan Brown dudo haya leído siquiera al Giorgio Vasari.

En todo caso, para alimentar mi optimismo, no todo tiene que ser gris como uniforme de los PFPos, he escuchado que los de la resistencia ya se están poniendo las pilas y organizan actividades chidas como toquines para jalar banda. ¡Vientos Huracanados!


M@rcosa insustancial,
Norwich, G(ran) B(analidad)
3/4/07


P.D.Anti Benson & Hedges. "No todo está dicho".

… “What you are about to do, DO IT quickly” John 13:27