WRITING STORIES - The Lawless Early Days of Print

I doubt you could have missed the pair, seated in the Swan tavern on Fleet Street in London, that 28 March,  1716.  Last to arrive was the infamous publisher, pornographer and plagiarist Edmund Curll, a scarecrow of a man, very tall and thin, splayfooted, and with gray goggle eyes that threatened to burst from his pale face like a cartoon character.

 Waiting for him like a spider on his web was one the greatest poets in history, the oft quoted and revered deformed genius Alexander Pope (above), with a Roman nose and a spine so twisted he stood barely four feet six inches tall from his stylish shoes to the top of the hump on his back. 

Curll thought he had been invited to settle their disagreements. Pope intended upon doing just that, by poisoning his guest's beer.  Later Pope joyfully wrote a mocking obituary of his victim, “A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, bookseller...To be published weekly”. Curll was not killed, but he did projectile vomit until he wished his was dead. It was like a scene from Animal House. Ah, good times among the 18^th century London literati.

Publishing was in its youth, as young as the internet is today, and just as chaotic, dishonest, unregulated, and unencumbered with a functional business model. In 1688 there were only 68 printing presses in London, all controlled by members of the Stationer's Company or guild.  But in 1695 Parliament refused to renew the company's monopoly, setting off a decade of pure anarchy. Daniel Defoe of "Robinson Crusoe" fame, noted, “One man studies seven year(s), to bring a finished piece into the world, and a pirate printer....sells it for a quarter of the price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament".  So in 1710 Parliament obliged with The Statue of Anne - she was queen at the time - which created a 14 year copyright for authors. Still, six years later one author felt required to strike at a pirate printer – by making him vomit for 24 straight hours, and then attacking him again in print with his obituary in rhyme .

“Next o'er his books his eyes begin to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole;
How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug.”

Alexander Pope (above)  The Dunciad (1728)

Pope's justification for the poisoning of  Edmund Curl was as revenge for embarrassing the smart and lovely Lady Mary Montagu. The morally pompous poet, so famous for his version of Shakespeare and translations of Homer that he was nicknamed “the Bard”, was smitten with the lady. They even maintained a correspondence.  Pope privately published one of her poems. Copies were discretely passed about the English court. But soon, Curll was selling copies on the streets. Cultured nobility were not supposed to engage in publication – it smacked of stooping to actually earning a living. So Pope saw himself as a knight protecting Lady Montagu's honor when he poisoned  Curll and attacked him (among others) in his poem, “Dunciad”.  Curll responded by pirating the poem about his own attempted murder, even publishing an annotated version, also called a “key”. Mocked Curll, “How easily two wits agree, one writes the poem, one writes the key”.

Edmund Curll was not quite the “shameless Curll” Pope portrayed – not quite. He was infamous for keeping a revolving stable of struggling quill drivers “three in a bed” in the “low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses” jammed into Grub Street (above). Originally “grub” referred to the roots and insect larval uncovered when the street was originally scrapped out. Eventually it was adopted as a badge of honor by the poverty stricken occupants, like the eventual great biographer Samuel Johnson, or Ned Ward, who considered his profession as “scandalous...as whoring....”.

These grubs were hack writers, named after the ubiquitous horse drawn Hackney cabs that plied London's streets, going where ever their paying passengers demanded. 

Which usually meant, obscenity, which as today, always sold well, as did insults and attacks on the pompous and well to do - like Pope (above). The occasional advance, paid to a hungry writer was called a “grub stake”, and the pitiful meals they could afford were “grub”.  Jonathan Swift, eventual creator of “Gulliver's Travels”, grandiosely referred to this literary sub-culture as "the Republica Grubstreet-aria. But like Johnson, Swift was clever enough and lucky enough to eventually escape the life as a mere grub.

In fact, Curll employed no more Grub Street warriors than any other Fleet Street baron. But he was particularly adept at supplying what the public wanted - licentious sex, and manufactured controversy. Curll paid grubs to engage in a “pamphlet war” - much like the Fox News war on Christmas - over the 1712 trial of Jane Wehham for witchcraft. (She was convicted).

Curll also printed cheap pirated books that sold for a mere shilling, thus undercutting the actual author's authorized editions. His growing empire made Edmund Curll one of the most successful barons on Fleet Street. Acknowledged one critic, “He had no scruples either in business or private life, but he published and sold many good books.”  All paid for by the dirty and stolen books he published illegally.

With Pope's urging, Curll was convicted of obscenity in 1716, and twice more in 1725. In 1726, Curll struck back by befriending the mistress of a Pope confident. She passed him several letters in which the arrogantly moral Pope admitting to lusting after the Blount Sisters, Terresa and Martha. “How gladly would I give all that I am worth,” Pope wrote in one purloined missive, “for one of their maidenheads.” Embarrassed, Pope helped engineer yet another Curll conviction in February of 1727. 

This time a frustrated and exasperated court fined Curll and ordered him pilloried for an hour. At the mercy of the mob, Curll was spared the usual assault of rotted food and manure when a pamphlet was read to the well armed crowd, claiming Curll was being punished for defending the departed Queen Anne. Thus misinformed, the mob carried him home on their shoulders. Pope was infuriated and determined to even the score.  Which is why he poisoned Curll.

One of Edmund Curll's most profitable ventures was what came to be called “Curlicisms”. When a well known figure died, Curll would advertise a forthcoming biography, and ask the public for any anecdotes about or letters from the deceased. Then, without validating the submissions Curll would hire a Grub street hack to string them together into an instant and usually inaccurate biography, creating what one potential subject described as “one of the new terrors of death.”

Curll had done this when the Duke of Buckingham died in 1721. But Buckingham was a peer, a member of the House of Lords, and that body summoned Curll for interrogation. Curll was unrepentant, since it was not a crime to publish writings of a peer without their permission. So the Lords made it illegal, and in this Pope saw a new opportunity to injure Curll.

In 1731 Curll announced a upcoming “Curlicism” of Alexander Pope, himself; “Nothing shall be wanting,” Curll assured his potential readers, “but his (universally desired) death.” Again Curll called for submissions and a mysterious figured identified only as “P.T.” offered letters written by Pope to the Lord of Oxford.  In 1734 Curll published the letters in a vicious biography of Pope. The next year Pope published his own “Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years”, including the same letters to Oxford.  But the details in Pope's version did not match those published by Curll, as Pope pointed out when he alleged Curll had violated the privilege of a member of the House of Lords and worse, slandered the Lord while doing it. The trap was sprung.

The only problem was, Curll again refused to repent. Called again before the Lords, Curll quipped, "Pope has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him.” And in fact as well. The Duke of Oxford still had the original letters in his files. So, asked Curll, where had P.T.'s inaccurate versions come from? Curll produced P.T.'s letters so the Lords could judge for themselves who was implicated by the handwriting. 

For a few days, the city of London, or that section that cared about such things, held its breath. And then an ad appeared in a small newspaper offering 20 guineas if P.T. would come forward to admit he had “acted by the direction of any other person.”  P.T., of course did not appear. And the ploy fooled no one – Pope had written the originals and the fakes and even the ad, and everybody knew it. The House found a political solution; since the published letters were fakes, the law had not been broken. Case closed, except Pope now had even more egg on his face.

Wrote Curll, “Crying came our bard into the world, but lying, it is to be feared, he will go out of it.”.

And so he did.  Pope died on 30 May, 1744, and Edmund Curll followed him in December of 1747.

Thus, Curll earned the last word. He described his relationship with Pope this way, “A fitter couple was never hatched, Some married are, indeed, but we are matched”.

- 30 -

IN MEMORIUM; Stupidity and Humanity

I hate to admit it but Marcel Proust was probably right. Even people who know history tend to repeat the same idiotic mistakes their grandfathers made, who were, of course, repeating their grandfather’s mistakes - Etc. ad naseum. As proof of this dismaying lack of a learning curve in humans I give you the noble sacrifice of the Right Honorable William Huskisson, Minister of Parliament (above). If Christ died for our sins, then William Huskisson died to prove that the human species are morons.

On 15 September, 1830, the first steam powered passenger rail line opened between Manchester and Liverpool, England. Riding in the inaugural train from Liverpool was Mr. Huskisson, stewing over a political beef he had with then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. (Get it? Stewing over Beef Wellington?) When the train stopped at Parksdale station, 17 miles outside of Liverpool, to take on water, Huskisson disembarked, the better to harass the Duke, who was riding in the last car of the same train. As he reached through that car’s window to shake the reluctant Dukes’ shoulder,  the inaugural train out of Manchester roared through the station at the unheard of speed of 25 miles per hour. Mr. Huskisson froze in a panic. The Duke tried to pull Huskisson into his car, but the westbound train was faster than the Duke. It crushed Huskisson’s foot and pulled his leg under the wheels and further mangled it. His death later that night in great agony made headlines all across England - Train Kills Man. And William Huskisson was the first. Maybe they should have left more space between the two tracks.

In the 175 years since it has become a given that to be killed by a train you have to be an idiot. I mean, it’s not as if trains swerved and hit people at random. Pretty much you have to be on the train tracks to be hit by a train. See tracks, look for train. See train, get off tracks. But according to the U.S. Department of Transportation some 2,618 stupid pedestrians and drivers in this country were killed by trains in 2010.

But are people stupider for being hit by trains, or are the rest of us stupider for not noticing the consistency with which people avoid crossing guards and ignore flashing warning lights or who look but don’t see a huge locomotive barreling down upon them? Could it not be that perhaps having several thousand tons of steel, which may take a mile to stop, rushing through our neighborhoods “at grade” for the last 170 years constituted a fundamental design flaw? Perhaps being hit by a train is never entirely the victim’s fault. After all, just how smart are engineers who don’t allow for human stupidity in their designs?

I bring all this up to point out that the geniuses who operate the lovely Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco have finally built a suicide barrier on their lovely bridge. Construction finally started in August of 2018. The idea was to put something between the potential suicide and the empty space hundreds of feet above the cold ocean water besides a simple waist high railing.

Since the lovely Golden Gate opened on 27 May, 1937, more than 1,700 people  have jumped from the lovely span, dropping 250 feet into the cold water,. Perhaps they were foolish enough to think their suicide would be a romantic  graceful swan dive which would end by hitting the salt water at something around 75 miles per hour. At that speed water behaves much like concrete, and if you haven’t seen a jumper who has hit concrete, I highly recommend you avoid seeing one or being one. But, more bad news, amazingly, a surprising number of people survive the initial impact. They have multiple broken bones and internal injuries, but most then drown, while in extreme agony.  One worker who admits to witnessing 4 survivors pulled from the water pointed out, "They don't want to hurt themselves. They just want to end it all."  

The original design for the bridge had a higher barrier but Joseph Strauss, who was the head designer, was a short guy, and he rejected it because it would have blocked his view. The next serious proposal for a barrier on the pedestrian walkway did not come until the 1970’s, after some 600 people had already clambered over the railing. Of course, once the idea was suggested the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which operates the bridge, and the citizens of San Francisco who own it, they all slapped themselves in their collective foreheads and said, “Well, duh!”  Unfortunately, they did not.

The idea was rejected. And rejected again in 1998. And the arguments against a barrier were just….well, stupid. Said the opponents, “If people can’t jump off this bridge, they’ll just jump off some other bridge”. That may be true, but so what? Do we NOT put STOP signs at an intersection because if people don’t collide there, they’ll just crash at some other intersection?

Said the unadorned bridge's defenders, “Why should everybody pay for a barrier to save the lives of a small minority?” By that reasoning, all those suicides were sacrificed so a pint sized engineer could have an unobstructed view of San Francisco Bay -  on those rare days when the fog did not obstruct everybodies' view.  And he's been dead for a few years, so could we just let go of that argument? It all seems particularly silly, when you remember that the members of the M.T.C. always agreed to a barrier to prevent pedestrians and bicyclists from falling onto the roadway, but remained opposed to one to prevent people from jumping or falling the other way, into the bay. Stupid.

Finally, on August 20, 2010, the M.T.C. accepted the design for a steel catch mat, which will hang 20 feet below the bridge and extend 20 feet out over the water.  Too far for the average person to jump. So why did stupid San Francisco suddenly get smart? Well, in 2006 filmmaker Eric Steel released the ultimate snuff film, "The Bridge", staring the lovely Golden Gate Bridge. Over three years Steel had sought to capture the many moods of the bridge by just pointing a camera at the bridge and letting it run. In doing so he had also inadvertently captured 19 suicides on film. When his film was released the public image of the lovely bridge was not so lovely anymore. Of course, the M.T. C. has decided that the $200 million to build the suicide barrier "will not come from bridge toll revenues".   Isn't that the kind of thinking that originally led to those 1,700 deaths?

 Well, given enough time, Mr. Huskisson, perhaps your death will have meaning after all. Someday.

- 30 -

A NEW DEAL - The Death of Capitalism

I have a few surprises for you. The Great Depression, which began in 1929, was even worse than the history books say it was.  The unemployment rate during the Great Depression is usually said to have been almost 25%.  But farmers and farm workers were not considered unemployed until they had lost their farms.   In 1933 the unemployment rate amongst non-farm workers was actually 37%.  

By 1933 the average income of American families had been cut by 40%,  Nine million savings accounts had been completely wiped out.  Sixty per cent of Americans were living below the poverty level.  One in four Americans had been evicted from their homes. And 2 million Americans were reduced to working as migrants.  

By 1934 almost half of the banks in America had failed. Corporate profits had fallen by 90%. New home construction  had dropped by 80%.  Between 1930 and 1933, prices had fallen by 20%,  and industrial output had been reduced by almost half.

The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. It cut unemployment by half, but that still left one in five Americans looking for a job, any job.  In 1929 investments by individuals, corporations and governments, a practical display of faith in the future, had been $92 billion. By 1933 that faith in the future had fallen to $10 billion.  Four years of the New Deal had returned that investment to $94 billion. 

However, it was just then that the deficit hawks insisted that the government must now “balance its books”, “pay its bills” and “live within its means”.  Federal budgets were slashed in 1937, and in 1938. Investments dropped to $61 billion.  This period is called “The Roosevelt Recession”. To quote from Wikipedia, “Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, rising…to more than 12 million in early 1938…Personal income in 1939 was almost at 1919 levels…”. High levels of unemployment remained until 1943, when war work finally reduced unemployment to just 2%.

World War Two was almost as expensive on the home front as it was on the front lines. In the first 18 months of U.S. involvement in World War Two, from December 7, 1941, to April 1, 1943, 12,123 Americans died in uniform. Over that same period 65,000 civilians died in industrial accidents all across America - 4 civilian deaths for every one military death. 

These civilian workers died while making artillery shells, machine gun bullets, building bombers and digging coal. Civilian deaths declined steeply over the last two years of the war, but with American combat deaths totaling about 300,000 for all four years, the final disparity remained about three civilian dead for every one dead soldier in uniform.

Despite the drop in unemployment brought on by war production, poverty actually increased during the war years. According to a Congressional Committee, with unemployment close to just 2% during the war, 20 million Americans still went to bed hungry.  One in four wage earners was making just 64 cents an hour. Part of that was capitalistic resistance to the "new" minimum wage laws, and part was the result of a massive influx of people into the job market. Three million teenagers dropped out of high school to work in war plants.

The war did not lead to inflation because it simply was not allowed to.  In 1929 the top tax rate, applied to incomes over $100,000 a year ($16 million per year, today), was 24%. By the end of the war the top rate was 94%.   In addition there was a “Victory Tax” of 5% tacked onto all income. You could avoid paying that tax on a portion of your income, by buying “War Bonds”. They earned only 2.9% interest, but more than half of all Americans bought them to avoid the Victory Tax. This took $185.7 billion (about half the cost of the war) out of circulation for ten years, until the bonds reached maturity. The sacrifices required were shared by all Americans, as were the benefits of victory.

In economic terms, America’s Second World War was the New Deal on steroids. In 1948 President Harry Truman gave the final price tag for America’s war at $341 billion, ($4 trillion in modern currency). The most obvious expenses, such as tanks, airplanes, tents, military bases, aircraft carriers, artillery pieces and explosives, were items that had little if any peace time applications. By the last few months of the war,  aircraft went directly from the production lines, to the scrap yards. But those were, in fact, merely the most obvious expenses. Despite what conservative ditto thinkers might insist, by 1965 that enormous war debt had been repaid in full. The year before our entry into the war the national debt, what with all that New Deal deficit spending,  was 43% of the Gross Domestic Product. In 1946 it was 128%. In 1965, it was back to 45%.

The debt was repaid so quickly because we spent our way to prosperity, something the ultra conservatives  insist is an impossibility. New highways and rail lines, power plants, refineries and water systems, built to supply war plants and their workers, provided increased opportunities for profit in the post war years. More importantly, more than 7 million veterans went back to school, fully funded under public law 346, the “G.I. Bill”.  By 1951 this single piece of social legislation had educated 8 million veterans. One and a half million were given “on the job training”, two million went to two and four year colleges, including three American Presidents (including Ronald Regean) 14 Nobel Prize winners, and hundreds of thousands of teachers, doctors, nurses and businessmen. According to a 1988 Congressional Budget Office Study, for every dollar spent on the G.I. bill, $7 was repaid in increased earnings, consumer spending and taxes paid back into the government. And that does not include the result of a better educated, healthier workforce on production. The result for business was that the productivity of two man-hours in 1940 could be matched by just one man-hour in 1965.  And yet the number of employed more than increased to match the population growth.

If there is a lesson here for our current hobbled economy, it is that we should not be attempting to emulate the New Deal, but the Second World War.  We  must declare war on our own fear, bigotry, ignorance and greed. Goals must be set - sustainable energy, a smart power grids, rejuvenated transportation systems, universal health care, and lifelong free education  - goals which once met will generate new wealth. To meet those goals, limits must be set, such as limits to the level of  sacrifice required from each economic group.  On the other side of any sacrifice there must be a demonstrable healthier, stronger democracy, and not just another handful of billionaires.

At the core of this proposal is the fundamental truth that capitalism is not sustained by a wealthy few.   If that were true the Kings and Queens of old should have produced capitalism eons earlier . Merely replacing the greed of the nobility with the greed of the richest does not sustain an economy.  Capitalism is  the product of a large, healthy middle class. And if the inequities of capitalism are justified by its advantages, then it must raise the standard of living and fuel the  ambitions of the most people possible. The production of billionaires is merely a happy side effect of capitalism, it cannot be a justification for the greed and selfishness which capitalism rewards. .

Today the ratio of national debt to Gross Domestic Product exceeds 200% -  twice what it was in at the end of World War Two. That is because, during the most recent spending spree (The Republican tax cut of 2018, in particular)  we made no investment in the middle class, no investment to provide for future wealth. And then came the Covid-19 pandemic. In short, time is running out for capitalism. And if it dies, it will be suicide. The golden goose will have been killed by its most fanatic acolytes, the bankers and the CEO's, the hedge fund managers - those addicted to greed and stupidity.  And the first step in curing any addict, is to cut them off from their drug of choice.

                                                 - 30 -

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY - The Waltz King Goes To War

 

I have always thought of Austrian Emperor Joseph II, as a bit of a schizophrenic, half enlightened revolutionary and half unsighted dictator, and totally a legend in his own mind. He explained himself this way; “I am a royalist by trade”, a truly conflicted description by a man whom, I suspect, did not fully understand what a tradesman was or did.

But Benedict Anton Michael Adam Hapsburg (his real name) was astute enough to hire Amadeus Mozart to waltz his court, and turned him lose to produce his greatest opera, Don Giovanni; and for that we all should be grateful to the man they called the “Musical King”. I prefer Mozart’s “The Wedding of Figaro” myself, but then it is a generally accepted truth that I have no taste in opera.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ7PKtS2BR8&feature=related)

But I love the “il catalogo e questo” when the servant Leporello comforts the rejected Donna Elvira by listing Don Juan’s feminine conquests. “In Italy, six hundred and forty; In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; But in Spain already one thousand and three.” But I digress... 

On the other hand, Joseph’s catalog of failings came into sharp focus in 1787 when, displaying a miserable sense of geopolitical timing, Joseph declared war on the Ottoman Turkish Empire. He was just trying to live up to a treaty with Catherine the Great of Russia, but it was not a popular decision with the ruling elite in Vienna. The conservatives were unhappy with the new taxes levied to pay for the war. The price of bread in Vienna went so high that bakeries in the capital were actually looted. And that simply encouraged the wealthy young liberals to see the war as a betrayal of the democratic ideas Joseph had seemed to support. They found reasons to travel abroad and avoid their draft notices.

The rest of the polyglot empire had fewer options. While the army was officered almost solely by German speaking Austrians, the bulk of the soldiers were divided between Italian speaking Lombards from south of the Alps and Slavic speakers from the Balkans. And no attempt was made to bridge the divides between them. In fact they were encouraged, under the divide and rule, rule. When Joseph took the field in the summer of 1788 to join his 100,000 man army then laying siege to Belgrade, disaster seemed inevitable to everybody except Joseph.

The decision to lay siege to Belgrade was logical. The Turkish city on the Danube had been captured by Austrian armies in 1688 and again in 1717. Each time it had been lost again, the last time in 1739, but there was a young leader on the throne in Turkey, and Joseph was looking to grab a quick trophy to assuage his critics.

Unfortunately Joseph encamped his army on mosquito infested marshland outside of Belgrade, and over the next few weeks 33,000 of his troops contracted malaria, including Joseph. He had lost a third of his army and he hadn’t even fought a battle yet. And then in early September Joseph received intelligence that the Turks were sending troops to reinforce the fortress of Vivda, on the Timas River, a tributary of the Danube.

The fortress was called Bada Vida, or Grandma Vida, because it had been a border fort since before the Romans. Clearly the Turks were intending on opening a supply line to Vida, down the Timas and then up the Danube to Belgrade, breaking the siege. Joseph decided the best way to counter that move was to take Bada Vida, before the Turkish reinforcements arrived. So between attacks of debilitating fevers, Joseph ordered an immediate forced march to capture Vida, and the nearby village of Karansebes.

You see, Joseph had a logical reason for doing everything he did. On paper Joseph was a genius. It was only in reality that he was a complete fool. Having been raised to be a King, Joseph expected his army to have blind faith in him. So he didn't tell most of his officers where they were going or why. But in reality his army lacked faith in themselves, faith in their leaders and they certainly had no faith in Joseph. That just left everybody blind.

The troops dispatched to Vida had no idea why they were marching away from Belgrade so quickly. In a few hours their joy at escaping the stinking marshes was replaced by exhaustion. And still their Austrian officers drove them onward, without stopping for food or rest. By 17 September the forward cavalry scouts had reached the Timis River. Crossing over the bridge late in the afternoon, the fatigued scouts fell upon a camp of Tzigani, commonly called gypsies. The Tzigani were well stocked with schnapps, which they reluctantly shared with the cavalry scouts.  Suddenly things were starting to look up in this crummy war.

An hour behind the scouts in the gathering dusk came an equally weary infantry battalion. The cavalrymen, well drunk by this time, decided the infantry were after their booze. They constructed a makeshift fort from the gypsy wagons and, as the infantry approached, fired a warning shot or two. The infantry officers, unsure of where they were going or why, shouted for their men to halt, pronounced in German as “halfte, halfte”. What the Slavic infantry heard was “utisit, utisit”, which is Czech for “Allah”.  They thought their own officers were warning them the shooting was coming from the Ottoman Turkish Army.

Some returned fire. When the infantry fired back, more of the drunken cavalry fired. This exchange of gunfire, first, convinced the infantry officers it was Turks to their front, and second, stampeded the Tzigani’s horses, which convinced the officers they were about to be attacked by Turkish cavalry. The Austrian officers ordered a retreat, wondering why their scouts had not warned them the enemy was so near. The retreat immediately turned into a rout.

As the following battalions crossed the bridge they heard shooting to their front. Understandably they mistook the retreating solders for advancing Turks. They threw their men into firing lines and let go with volley after volley, killing  their own men trying to retreat.  And still the attackers came on, charging through the darkening shadows. From the advance battalion's point of view, they were not attacking they were retreating, under heavy fire. They had to get to the bridge, to escape the Turkish trap they had obviously stumbled into. And like dominoes the Austrian battalions broke for the rear, one after the other.

On the other side of the bridge, officers were throwing up a defensive line to hold back the Turks, of whom there were actually none within fifty miles.

Meanwhile the drunken scouts had begun to suspect they might be in some trouble. They grabbed their booze and went galloping for the only escape route. As they thundered over the wooden bridge, the Austrian artillery opened up on them. The cavalry overran them, and the entire Austrian army melted away, pausing only to plunder a few villages and rape a few peasant women. The retreat reached such levels of panic that Joseph was knocked off his horse and fell in a stream, not a recommended treatment for a man recovering from malaria. The army did not stop until they returned to their siege lines outside of Belgrade and the perception of safety.

Forty-eight hours later a small part of the real Turkish army, sent to secure the fortress of Vida, stumbled upon the remains of a great battle. Ten thousand dead and wounded Austrian soldiers, with their equipment, were scattered across the fields around the village of Karansebes. It was a great victory which didn’t cost the Turks a dime. They weren't even there. The only other losers,, besides the Austrians, were the Tzigani who not only lost their schnapps but also lost their horses, and an unknown number of human casualties.

Joseph abandoned the army in front of Belgrade, turning it over to retired Field Marshal Gideon von Loudon.  Loudon would capture Belgrade the following year. By then Joseph was near death, weakened by a combination of malaria and stupidity.   He died in November 1788, broken by his failures. And by dying, Joseph now abandoned Mozart.

Amadeus Mozart lost his cushy court job. He never wrote another opera, and spent the next two years spending more time writing letters begging for money than he spent writing music. He died in 1791, famously buried in a pauper’s mass grave. Realizing this makes watching the the final scene in “Don Giovanni” all the more poignant. The aging reprobate hero is challenged to either repent or burn in eternal damnation. Don Juan has the chutzpa to sing, “To none will I succumb! For me there's no repentance.” How refreshing to meet an honest liar, if only on the stage.

It was almost as if Mozart was trying to send a message to Joseph. I wonder if the Emperor ever got it?

- 30 -