APRIL FOOLS DAY

I don’t approve of practical jokes. I seen nothing humorous in having your shoes set afire while you are wearing them. And dribble glasses are not only not practical they are also not funny - especially on “April Fools Day”, when every glass is a dribble glass and every shoe is a potential combustion chamber. And it turns out that this celebration of sociopathic behavior was invented by the French, a nation without humorous inclinations since Moliere slipped on a banana peel in 1673. But the story of April Fool’s Day began over a century before that comedic-tragic event, when in 1564 King Charles IX decided to follow Pope Gregory’s suggestion and begin the calendar on January rather than April. Why the French originally celebrated New Years Day on April 1st, I have no idea.

Now, in the 16th century, France had only one road. It came out of Paris, turned left, looped all the way around the city and re-entered on the other side of town. This tragic design error,(the world’s first Traffic Circle) made communication with the majority of the nation difficult (and introduced the phrase “Out-of-the-Loop”), and when combined with the French telephone system - which was in no better shape in the 16th century than it is today - meant that a lot of peasants never got the King’s memo concerning the calendar adjustment.

So as they had every year, thousands of these ill-informed peasants journeyed to Paris during the last week of March and on what they thought was New Year’s Eve, gathered in Bastille Square to say bonjour to 1565 and watch the guillotine drop on 1566. In unison they gleefully chanted, “Cing, quartre, trios, deux, un” and…No guillotine. No satisfying plop of a head into the basket. No Campaign corks popping. No le Dick Clark. Instead of cheers and shouts of glee, mass ennui broke out amongst the masses. Now anyone who has experienced the Parisian version of “good manners” can imagine what came next; the locals mocked the bewildered peasants and made them feel like complete Americans,…ah, I mean,fools. But the way they did it makes the word “odd” seem inadequate.

For reasons beyond understanding the Parisians snuck up behind their confused country cousins, surreptitiously stuck a paper fish to the bumpkin’s backs and then shouted in a loud voice, “Poisson d’Avril!”, which translates as “April Fish!”, and then collapsed in raucous laughter and shouts of “tres bien.”

Why would they shout “April Fish!”? I have no idea. But, perhaps the first Parisian to label his victim an "April Fool” immediately received a mouth full of fist, while calling the victim an "April Fish” confused him just long enough so that the prankster could escape.

I have long thought that this uncharacteristic outbreak of French “humor” was actually inspired by Charles’ Italian Queen, Catherine de Medici, who was already famous throughout Europe for her gastronomical gags,  such as her duck a la cyanide with a hemlock sauce. Only a Medici could see the humor in humiliating the people who handled your food.

But however it started, the Parisians knew a good time when they saw it and they sent peasants on “fool’s errands”, and tricked peasants with “fool’s tales”, until every April 1st, France reverberated with gales of laughter and shouts of “Poisson d’Avril!” Good times. But eventually the Parisian bullies grew bored with taunting the unresponsive peasants and in 1572 they shifted their attentions to the Huguenots. But by then the tradition of humiliating people for your own amusement on the first day of April had become popular. And like Disco music and Special Federal Prosecutors, once invented some institutions have proven impossible to stop.

This holiday for the humor-impaired spread around the globe with the new calendar like a fungus, infecting and evolving a little in each afflicted nation. The Germans added the “Kick Me” sign, and a second day which they call “Taily Day”, to further enjoy the frivolity of bruised buttocks. Ahh, those Germans.

In Portugal, today’s innocent victim is hit with flour, sometimes while it is still in the bag - the flour not the victim. In Scotland the target is humiliatingly referred to as an “April Gawk” (?!), in England as a “Noodle” and in Canada as an “American.” I would have expected mental health professionals to call for a stop to this public insanity but evidently they are too busy setting their patients’ shoes on fire.

Not even a war could snap the world out of this cruel insanity. In what may have been the first time a practical joke qualified as a war crime, on April 1, 1915 a French pilot buzzed the German trenches and dropped a huge bomb, which bounced. Four years later the citizens of Venice awoke on April 1, to discover their sidewalks littered with cow manure, the "gag" of a visiting Englishman, Horace de Vere Cole, with too much time on his hands and too much money in his pockets. But then what can you expect from a man who would honeymoon on April Fool's day? Bad humor moved into the electronic age in 1957 when BBC Television News broadcast a report about the successful and bountiful Swiss harvest of spaghetti.  On April Fool's Day in 1992, National Public Radio in the United States, broadcast the announcement that Richard Nixon was coming out of retirement to run again for President, under the slogan, "I didn't do anything wrong and I won't do it again."

Some years later, ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Company, carried a report that the nation was about to switch to "Metric Time". The next morning would begin at midnight, but each minute would be made up of 100 milidays, each hour of 100 centedays, and each day would consist of 20 decadays. It is alleged that the following morning nobody in Australia showed up for work on time, but it is unclear if that was because the April Fools joke or merely because, being Australia, they all still had a hangover, mate.

Admit it; there is no defense against April Fool tomfoolery, except a preemptive strike. So button up your top button, zip up your pants, tie your shoes and look out for that cat. Load up your water gun, warm up your fart cushion and repeat after me; “Poison d’Avril, sucker!”

Funny, huh?

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QUEEN OF DENILE Part Seven

I come back to the beginning, to the face of she who comes in beauty. Nefertiti draws you back, as if she were about to speak. But who could ever live up to her image? Icons exist because they are the humans ideal. And ideals are a human weakness, and a strength. They are what we wish we were. But they are not reality. Consider this - when she married her King, Nefertiti  (above) was just 14 years old, little more than a girl. 

But when she sat for Thutmose the sculptor she was around thirty, and had born six children, two of whom had died. There was a lifetime in those sixteen years in-between, her life time, the more so because she would be dead before she was 35. Look at her again, and see if she is the same woman, in your eyes.

Her mummy has never been found, while her King's mummy has been identified (above). We now know that Akenaten the heretic king stood just 5' 3” tall, that he a had crooked teeth. And yet he had come to see himself as a messenger of god. His beloved Nefertiti could not have lived with him without believing that as well. 

The simplest explanation for the confusion that followed Akenaten's death is that Nefertiti became Pharaoh. And after a reign of less than four years, she was replaced by her nephew, called Tukenaten until her death, and Tutankhamen afterward. He was the boy king who returned the capital to Memphis, and whose mostly intact tomb caused such a sensation when it was opened in 1922 by the Englishman Howard Carter. But King Tut left no heirs, and his was succeeded by Nefertiti's father, the ambitious Ay. His finally wore the twin crowns. But his rise after Nefertiti's death seems to imply he must have played some role in the event. We know with a certainty that he returned to the old faith of Amun Ra and participated in the removal of her memory from Egyptian records. What kind of father could wipe out the memory of his own daughter?   

The man who financed the expedition that brought her back into the light, Henri James Simon, died in Paris after a short illness in December of 1932 – less than a month before Adolf Hitler came into power. And then Simon became a non-person, removed from history like the Queen of the Nile. Simon's crime, like Nefertiti's, was a matter of religion. He was a Jew. As was Ludwig Borchardt (above). Both men were despised by the Nazi goons, not for their flesh but for an Antisemitic image of them. Simon was the lucky one. Borchadt, the man who betrayed his profession for his country, was hounded out of Germany, and died in Paris in August of 1938.

On the west wall of the tomb prepared for Ay, in the cliffs east of Akhenaten, was inscribed a poem, perhaps even written by the old man himself. It ends; “Every lion comes from its den, All serpents bite.” On the tomb walls he was identified as a Grand Vizier, “God's Father”, the “Fan bearer to the right of the King”, “Overseer of All Horses”, a royal scribe and “Chief of the Archers”. The tomb's praises stop there because it was never used. The old man ruled as Pharaoh for perhaps ten years, and badly. His armies were defeated by the Hittites. After his death around 1320 B.C.E. the old man's mummy ended up sharing Tutankhamen tomb, in the Valley of the Kings. He was replaced by a commoner, his military commander, Horemheb.

It was the Pharaoh Horemheb who fully persecuted the memories of Nefertiti, Akenaten, Tutankhamen and Ay, and who abandoned the capital of Akheaten This must have made it difficult at home as his second wife was Mutnedjmet, Nefertiti's sister. No Egyptian Queen would ever again beg a foreign prince to share her kingdom. It was Horemheb who saved Egypt through reforms and reestablishing order. But he left no heirs, and the 18^th dynasty died with him. What came next was the 19^th, and Setti I, and the greatest Pharaoh of all, Ramses II.

It is usually forgotten in the press that to the archaeologists, the greatest find in Akenaten was not the beautiful lady abandoned on the floor of a forgotten sculptor's workshop, nor even the empty tombs carved into the limestone cliffs, but the the Armarna Letters. These 382 cuneiform baked clay tablets were the remains of Akhaten's “House of Correspondence”, the library of bureaucratic messages between the great kings of Babylon, Mycenae, Greece and the Hittites, and the Egyptian subject peoples across the Middle East. This treasure trove was discovered not by a European scientist, but by an old Egyptian woman, scrounging for dried dung, to fertilize her garden. She actually ground up an unknown number of the priceless tablets to bury in her back yard. And that is not the most absurd thing to have happened to the lady in the last 3,400 years.

According to Henri Stierlin, a Swiss historian, the Nefertiti bust was created by artist Gerardt Marks, made to order for Gustave Borchardt. Stierlin contends ancient Egyptians never cut their busts vertically at the shoulders, as Nefertiti is, and would never have allowed a figure missing an eye. He does admit the pigments used have been carbon dated to the time period of Nefertiti, but reminds defenders of the Neuse museum, that the altar offered to Egyptian antiquities by Borchardt has proven to be a fake. Why not another?

The problem is, if the altar is a fake, it was procured to distract the Cairo Museum away from the bust. Why bother to do that if the bust was also a fake? And Borchardt must have faked not only the bust, but his own diary entries (above)  a decade after they were written. So we now have to ask why he would commit a crime that would has sullied his reputation among archaeologist everywhere but Germany, and then commit yet another more difficult crime guaranteed to destroy his reputation in Germany? And how do you get 3, 400 year old pigments on a 100 year old bust? There is no record of any counterfeiter ever removing and re-hydrating ancient paint. And yet, to believe Stierlin, we have to believe Borchardt did all of that. To employ Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation would seem to be that Borchardt was trying to sneak Nefertiti out of Egypt, and Stierlin is just trying to sell books.

So the bust of Nefertiti is the real McCoy, a 3,400 years old “icon of international beauty” and confirmation that ancient peoples were after all just people, as stupid and smart, as greedy and selfless, as ugly and beautiful as you and I and the average supermodel. If Nefertiti was a living breathing enchantress whose radiant “smile is animated with an inner light”, as described by French Egyptologist Christian Jacq, then Thutmose who created the limestone and plaster bust of her, was as great an artist as Leonardo da Vinci who painted the Mona Lisa. And why not? There have been, in my brief lifetime, a Sophia Loren, a Catherine Deneuve, a Michelle Pfeiffer, and a Vanessa Williams. In the 2,000 year history of the Egyptian empire, why would there not have been a Nefertiti? And the truth is, what you see in the face of a beautiful woman or a statue, is always what you hope to see there.

Except the face of Nefertiti is not exactly smiling. I sense instead an air of dismissive superiority, arrogance and vanity. Given her unlimited power of life and death over her subjects, how could you call a Queen of the Nile an egomaniac? Who did not tell he she was beautiful? Who did not tell her she was wise? I would be willing to bet, no one – twice. How could the wife of a god, a Pharaoh herself, not be pretentious, smug, and supercilious? If Nefertiti truly believed that every July she was responsible for the Nile flood, how could she not be peremptory, pompous and presumptuous? If the sun god Aten was drawn to rise every morning in response to her entreaties, it would be illogical for her to be courteous, humble or obliging. For her to have displayed any sign of uncertainty, modesty or weakness, would have been a death sentence. So we should assume she did not do that, at least until just before her death.

So we are back to the beginning, still trying to separate the living woman from the stone image, the flesh and blood from the icon. Each year half a million people journey to look upon her visage. What each sees in her face is what each wants to see. Her father Ay saw a chance for advancement. Most ancient Egyptians saw a heretic. Akanaten saw the love of his life (above). Borchardt saw a path to fame. Adolf Hitler saw confirmation of Aryan purity. Modern Egyptians see an icon of imperialist arrogance. Modern Germans see an icon of German nationality. They are all wrong.

And they are all right. And so are you.

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PAYBACK

I should point out that when Martin Van Buren (above) was humiliatingly dumped into an Indiana hog wallow, ruining a very expensive pair of pearl gray trousers and coating his elegant frock coat with everything a happy swine leaves behind in a porcine sauna, it wasn't entirely fair. Of course “The Red Fox of Kinderhook” was far too crafty a politician to admit he had been humiliated. That would just draw more  humiliation. As the venomous Virginia politician John Randolph observed, Martin Van Buren always “rowed with muffled oars.” But everybody knew this traffic accident had been staged as payback for Van Buren having insulted Hoosiers. What goes around comes around. And it was useless to point out that the insult had mostly come from Van Buren's predecessor, the still popular Andrew Jackson.

Even the frail shadow of federal authority which existed in 1828 was too much for incoming President Andrew Jackson (above). Over his two terms, Jackson did his very best to attack "big government",  in all its endeavors except the ones of which he approved. Jackson vetoed a new charter for the National Bank - precursor of the Federal Reserve - which left the entire banking system unregulated. He streamlined the sale of public lands, which energized land speculators and overcharged yeoman farmers. He cut entire programs out of the Federal budget, and insisted the states take over many others. And at the same time he backed the Seminole Indian nation into a war.

But it was not until three months after his successor Van Buren's inauguration in March of 1837 that these pigeons came home to roost. The massive real estate bubble suddenly popped. Over half of the nation's unregulated banks suddenly failed. And by January of 1838 half a million Americans were unemployed. Or to put it more simply, suddenly it was prom night and Martin Van Buren was dating Carrie. And like Carrie's date, Van Buren then made things worse by slashing out at everything in sight. Oh, he continued the unending expensive Seminole war. But he insisted on killing Federal funding for the National Road, which had reduced mail time between Washington and Indianapolis from several months to less than a week. Van Buren was so doctrinaire he even sold off the construction workers' picks and shovels. And for frontier farmers trying to get their produce to market, that made any economic recovery that much harder.

See, once across the Ohio border, the $7,000 a mile construction costs for the National Road was supposed to be supplied by land sales. But when the real estate bubble popped in 1837, that funding evaporated. Maintenance for the 600 mile road was paid for by the tolls of four to twelve cents per ten mile section (the equivalent of $2.50 today), paid by the 200 wagons, horseback riders, farmers and herds of livestock that used each section of the road every day. But after 1837 that $36,000 a year (almost a million dollars today) had to do double duty, finishing the road and providing maintenance for the road already completed  And it was not enough.

Particularly in Indiana, there were long sections beyond the two urban centers, ((Indianapolis and Richmond) where farmers using the road to drive their livestock to market faced forests of 14 inch high tree stumps. These provided clearance for the farmers' and emigrants' high riding Conestoga wagons, but between the stumps, the road bed was in such bad shape that constant repairs to their equipment bankrupted many of the 200 stagecoach lines trying to survive in Indiana. And every frontier farmer and businessman knew exactly who was to blame for all of this –“President Martin Van Ruin”.  As a result, in the election of 1840, in Hendricks County, (just southwest of Indianapolis), and along the National Road, Van Buren received 651 votes, while Whig candidate William Henry Harrison received 1,189 votes. Nationwide, Van Buren carried just 7 of the 26 states.

Normally this Hoosier hostility would not have lasted long, but just six months after taking office, the new President Harrison died of a pneumonia, and all previous assumptions had to be rethought . The Whigs had picked John Tyler as Vice President, mostly to get rid of him. Now, disastrously, he was the head of their party. The overjoyed Democrats began referring to Tyler as “His Accidency.” The adroit and dapper Martin Van Buren began thinking he could avenge his defeat and take the road back to the White House in 1844. All he needed was a cunning plan, which he just happened to have. 

In February of 1842, Van Buren (above) journeyed to Nashville, Tennessee, for an extended visit with his mentor Andrew Jackson, hoping some of Old Hickory’s popularity would rub off on him. It did not. Heading north, Van Buren then set off for a tour of the frontier states. He was well received in Kentucky, and the pro-slavery areas around Cincinnati, Ohio, but the closer he got to Indiana the more reserved the crowds became.

In early June he was met at the Indiana border by 200 loyal Democrats, and gave them a speech at Sloan's Brick Stage House on Main Street (the National Road) in Richmond, Indiana. But the vast majority of the local Quakers remained skeptical. And while Van Buren was speaking, noted the Richmond Palladium newspaper, “...a mysterious chap partially sawed the underside of the double tree crossbar of the stage...so that it would snap on the first hard pull…”

The next morning the stagecoach and its distinguished passenger headed for Indianapolis, the “Capital in the Woods”. But just two miles outside of Richmond, while bouncing over ruts and stumps, the carriage splashed into a great deep mud hole. And when the horses were whipped to yank the carriage out, the weakened cross brace snapped. Dressed in his silk finery, Martin Van Burn was forced to disembark into the foul waters and wade to shore.

There was no indication of any further sabotage on Van Buren's 74 mile ride across the mostly open prairie, which took the better part of three days. The ex-President and future candidate made it to the Hoosier capital in time to keep his appointments and make his speeches over the weekend of June 9-10. He took two more days to make political contacts, shaking hands and trading confidences, before, on Wednesday, June 13, he boarded yet another mail coach for the 75 mile journey to Illinois. But just six miles down the road, Van Buren had to pass through the Quaker bastion of Plainfield, Indiana.

The town earned its name from the “plain folk” who had laid out the town ten years earlier on the east bank of White Lick Creek. This Henricks county town was straddled by the National Road, which provided Plainfield's livelihood. Less than a quarter mile up Main Street from the  ford over the "crick", amidst a stand of Elms, the Quakers had built a camp ground and built a meeting house. And here, that Wednesday morning, were gathered several hundred Wigs and Quakers, in their “Sunday, go to meeting clothes”, to see the once and maybe future President ride past. The crowd may have even been increased because the driver of this particular leg of the President's journey was a local boy, twenty-something Mason Wright. Soon, the crowd heard the blast of the horn from Mason's lips, warning of the VIP's bouncing approach down the gentle half mile slope toward White Lick Creek.

The disaster occurred abruptly. The coach rushed into view, with Van Buren's arm waving out of the coach's open window, while Teamster Wright whipped the horses to move faster. Faster? Shouldn't he be slowing down to let people get a view of the President?  And then, just as carriage came abreast of the center of the campground, the coach was forced to veer to the right to avoid a large "hog waller" mud hole in the very center of the dilapidated National Road. And as if  it had been planned, the right front wheel bounced over the hard knuckle of an exposed bare Elm root. The the carriage teetered for an instant until the rear wheel clipped the same root. The teetering coach then careened past the point of no return.  Mason Wright leaped free while the coach crashed heavily onto its side into the very center of the smelly, sticky, hot black hog waller. Martin Van Buren had been dumped again.

A Springfield Illinois newspaper would note a few days later, “He was always opposed to that road, but we were not aware that the road held a grudge against him!” Wrote a more bitter Wig newspaper, “the only free soil of which Van Buren had knowledge (of) was the dirt he scraped from his person at Plainfield.”  The driver and witnesses blamed the Elm (above), which could not defend itself. Van Buren was uninjured, but once again had to extricate himself from his injured coach. After pouring the mud and other unidentified muck from his boots, Van Buren made his way on foot further west along the National Road to Fisher’s Tavern, at what is now 106 E. Main Street. There, Mrs. Fisher helped the President clean up his pants and coat, and wash the mud from his wide brimmed hat.

Back at the campground. the honest Quakers helped to right the stage, re-attach the horses, and carefully and respectfully deliver the coach to Fishers to collect the President. But it is hard to believe that, as Mr. Van Buren splashed across White Lick "crick" many of those Quakers were not smiling with the sly satisfaction of a job well done. 

A few days later Teamster Mason Wright was awarded a $5 silk hat, although it was never explicitly stated it was for his skill in staging a stage crash - call it political slapstick. But the tree who's root had provided the fulcrum for the prank would forever more be known as the Van Buren Elm.  In 1916 (above) the Daughters of the American Revolution even gave the tree a wooden plaque of its own.

But the hard winter of 1926 brought the Van Buren Elm down, and a local doctor lamented, “The many friends of the old historic tree are loath to have it removed from their midst.”

Van Buren (above) made it safely to Illinois without further accidents. He was  met a few miles outside of Springfield by a small delegation of legislators, including the young Abraham Lincoln. But Mr. Van Buren was never elected to public office again. The judgement of Hoosiers stood firm.

The Quakers' Meeting House still stands among the stand of Elms at 256 East Main Street (corner of Vine) in Plainfield.  After the original Buchan Elm fell, a replacement was planted, and it received a bronze plaque (above).  This inspired a local grade school to be named for the dapper Democrat who stumbled in their town, and a street was named after him as well. But in Plainfield the National Road (now U.S. Route 40), is still called Main Street. That is true of many Midwestern towns bisected by the National Road. It truly was America's Main Street. And Martin Van Buren had been wrong about that.

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A WOODEN LEG NAMED SMITH

I recently read that the historian Bernard Lewis was once considering writing an essay on economics, but confessed he couldn't get past his own first paragraph. He had written, “In the history of human thought science has often come out of superstition. Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of alchemy. What will come out of economics?” Its such a good joke, Lewis figured saying anything else would just be repeating himself. Luckily, I have no such inhibitions. But then I also have no problem describing the World War One slaughter of Armenians as a holocaust, which Professor Lewis refuses to do. I guess we all tend to underestimate the power of our own psychology to confuse us...much as the ideologues of economics continue to do.

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”

The Wealth Of Nations

The godfather of capitalism was the fatherless Scotsman, Adam Smith (above). He presented to the world a “large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment” He had no love life that we know of, admitting “I am a beau in nothing but my books” And he wrote just two books – which was good because he was a really boring writer. He may be the most quoted lest read author since Moses. He wrote “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, first published in 1759, and “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, first published in March of 1776 - a month before the start of the American Revolution.

“If [justice] is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society... must in a moment crumble into atoms.”

The Theory Of Moral Sentiments

I give the date for the first publications of Smith's books because he never stopped re-writing them. Where the modern author fixes his mistakes by issuing an entirely new manifesto, yearly, Smith reworked his books until he ran out of time. There were four editions to “Moral Sentiments”, and five editions of “Wealth of Nations”. And with each edition they got longer, and more verbose. More than one reviewer has described “Wealth of Nations” as“tedious” and Thomas Jefferson recommend readers consult another author because he “treats the same subject on the same principles, but in a shorter compass and and more lucid manner” than Smith did.

“To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

The Wealth Of Nations.

The defining moment in American economics was the great depression. Fundamentalists adhere to the Old Time Religion of Roosevelt's New Deal; in time of business down turn, government should prime the pump, putting money into circulation to fuel a business recovery. Reform Theorists, like the Chicago School, contend the New Deal was actually a total failure. The key to economic stability, in their view, is faith in private enterprise and distrust of government enterprise. Why the generation which actually experienced the depression and recovery refused to believe the New Deal was a failure, is never explained in their ethos. And they expend a great deal of energy ignoring the godfather of capitalism, Adam Smith, when he virtually screams in both of his methodical works, that private enterprise, if left to its own devices, may be relied upon to destroy its own markets.

“The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities...”

The Wealth Of Nations.

Of course the first thing you notice when reading Adam Smith is that he never uses the word “capitalism ”. It had not been invented yet. And neither had the word psychology. But both were Professor Smith's subject when he wrote: “Every individual... intends only his own security; and...intends only his own gain, and he is in this...led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” And thus we meet Smith's magical “invisible hand”, used ever since he wrote that sentence to justify the greed, waste and “gluttony of the wealthy”, to quote Adam Smith. But that same invisible hand, says Smith, must also be guiding the tyranny of a socialist majority - for the greater good. It is the balance of the two which Smith promotes in his works, not a domination of one over the other. At times he seems to be channeling thinkers like Karl Marx - from a century in front.

“Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods....They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

The Wealth of Nations..

Dubious legend says that Adam Smith was once awakened from a muse to the sound of church bells. Dressed only in his nightshirt, he had walked, lost in thought, fifteen miles from his home on High Street in Kirkcaldy (below), to the outskirts of Durnfermline (above), Scotland. To have made that journey he would most likely have followed the Invertiel Road southwest to the village of Dalgety, before turning north west to Durnfermline. If he had done so, why did no one from Dalgety stop the lunatic wandering about in his night shirt? The story reads like the old joke about the man with a wooden leg named Smith. The punch line is "What is the other one called?"  But the two towns did play an important role in Smith's thinking.

“The man of system…seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that...every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”

The Theory Of Moral Sentiments,

Durnfermline had been the ancient seat of Scottish royalty, and had caught the first wave of industrialization, growing rich by mass producing the luxury damask weaves. But the feudal center had been outstripped by the hand looms of the port city of Kirkardy, which had tripled its output of simple linen over ten years (1733 -1743). As a youth Smith had thus seen first hand the power of capitalism to create and to waste, both markets and the lives of the workers and consumers. He admitted that his invisible hand was always ready to pick a pocket, even if only its own. And the legislature he derided in the above example might be a liberal “socialist” body, or a tea party of the faithful. Neither brand of political theatre impressed Adam Smith. He  believed in the bible, and in particular its ancient warning about the love of money being the root of all evil. He knew, and preached, that capitalism was not about the "job creators", but about the workers, the middle class - created by capitalism and feeding capitalism. They are the wealth of a nation - not gold or stock values. Without a healthy, growing middle class there can be no capitalism. 

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

The Wealth Of Nations

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