333 – Next Year In Birobidzhan? Stalin’s Siberian Zion

Since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD and their subsequent banishment from Palestine, the Jews had been without a national home until the founding of Israel in 1948. Right? Wrong.

The Soviets beat the Zionists by a few decades, and organised a Jewish Autonomous Region, improbably located on the Russian-Chinese border beyond Mongolia. Even more improbably, that region’s ‘Jewish’ status has survived stalinism, wars, deprivation and the fall of communism. But few Jews still reside in what was once billed as a future judeo-socialist utopia. Birobidzhan’s history remains, as one of the more bizarre footnotes in the struggle for a Jewish homeland.

“The Soviet solution of the national question is strikingly illustrated by the way the problems of the Jewish people have been dealt with in the Soviet Union,”  writes D. Bergelson in ‘The Jewish Autonomous Region’, a English-language pamphlet published in Moscow in 1939, entirely written in socialist utopian mode. It describes how Jews, formerly oppressed by the Czarist regime, are now flourishing in the egalitarian Soviet Union:

“Jewish fliers took part in the historic expedition to the North Pole. Thousands of Jews operate machines in factories and mills. In the city of Gorky (formerly Nizhni-Novgorod), in which Jews were not allowed to live in the times of tsardom) there are about eight thousand Jewish workers employed in the automobile works alone. Among the prominent Stakhanovite workers we find many Jews like Blidman, Khenkin, Yussim and others, whose names are known all over the country. Jewish Red Armymen who took part in the battles at Lake Hassan were among those decorated by the Soviet Government for their heroism and devotion. Jewish names are among those of the Heroes of the Soviet Union, as well as among those of the Deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics.”

One of the peculiarities of Soviet-style communism was the reality of having to deal with over 100 nationalities on the territory of the former Russian Empire. Not long after the 1917 Revolution, Moscow granted all of them a maximum of cultural and territorial autonomy (at least on paper). For the Jews, who had been a people without a country for 19 centuries, this was an unprecedented opportunity: “In addition to securing the Jews full equality, the Soviet Government has set aside a large district — Birobidjan — as a Jewish national territory. The Jews have thus acquired their statehood in the Soviet Union — the Jewish Autonomous Region, which is a unique and a most momentous development in the history of the Jewish people as a whole.”

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast (in Yiddish: Yidishe Avtonome Gegnt) was created in 1934 within the framework of Stalin’s nationality policy, centered on the town of Birobidzhan, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, close to Khabarovsk. The settlement of the area (by Russians), under way from the middle of the 19th century, was greatly speeded up by the Trans-Siberian Railway (completed in 1916). The creation of the JAO was meant to counter both Zionism and (religious) Judaism by creating an atheist, Soviet version of Zion, and further to settle the still sparsely populated Siberian lands bordering China.

A more cynical view of the genesis and location of the JAO is that it would make it possible to deport the Soviet Union’s entire Jewish population to one of the remotest corners of the country. Initially, Jewish pioneers were lured to Birobidzhan by a concerted propaganda effort, ranging from posters and pamphlets to movies and books – one movie told the story of American Jews escaping the Depression to start over in the Jewish utopia.

As the number of settlers grew, Jewish culture in the region blossomed. Valdgeym, Amurzet and other Jewish settlements were established, the Yiddish-language newspaper Birobidzhaner Stern (‘Star of Birobidzhan’) was founded. But the growth of the JAO was cut short by Stalin’s purges before and after the Second World War, and by the war itself. The purges even led to the burning of the entire Judaica collection in Birobidzhan’s local library. In the decades following the war, many Birobidzhan Jews chose to emigrate; in 2002, Jews constituted less than 2% of the region’s 200,000 inhabitants (90% Russian, 4% Ukrainian).

Bizarrely, this has not prevented a Jewish renaissance of sorts: Yiddish is once again taught in Birobidzhan’s schools, there are Yiddish-language radio and tv programmes and the aforementioned Birobidzhaner Stern continues to publish a section in Yiddish. A new synagogue was opened in 2004, and there is a Jewish National University. There are extensive links between the region and Israel, which is the home country of the JAO’s chief rabbi, Mordechai Scheiner. The rabbi is optimistic about the future of Yiddishkeit in Birobidzhan: “Today one can enjoy the benefits of the Yiddish culture and not be afraid to return to their Jewish traditions (…) Jewish life is reviving, both in quantity as in quality.”

This map is the cover of D. Bergelson’s pamphlet, which can be read in its entirety here at the Internet Archive. Many thanks to Thomas C Kneisley for sending it in.

332 – The Town That Neil Young Built

Each year around November 12th, whenever their schedules allow for a collective weekend off, a dozen not-so-young urban professionals leave the comfort of their city homes to sample the rugged charm of a remote log cabin. In the backwoods, the men (it is an all-male fellowship) don flannel shirts of the type favoured by Neil Young, and play his music non-stop. Thus, they celebrate Young’s birthday — and also by drinking a lot of beer, and by behaving like the uncouth backwoodsmen that any group of men eventually revert to when collectively removed from their womenfolk.

Christof Rutten is one of those men, recently returned from the latest of those outings. He sends in this map, culled from the latter part of Young’s weird, erratic oeuvre. Young has produced some of rock ‘n roll’s most emblematic anthems and ballads, but has also ventured down experimental avenues never explored before, or since, and all the better for it. Young tried his hand at rockabilly after its heyday, and electronic music before it was fashionable. He also penned a rock opera (or “concept album”, to use an even more suspect term).

Greendale, released in 2003 by the transplanted Canadian (Young lives in LA La Honda, south of San Francisco) is about life in a fictitious Californian coastal town as seen through the prism of the Green family. The songs on Greendale deal with some of Young’s favourite themes — war (and anti-war protest in general), environmentalism, social ostracism, violent crime and all of their social consequences. Greendale focuses on an ageing patriarch (also a pioneer and hippie) his son Earl (an artist and Vietnam vet), granddaughter Sun (environmental activist), and the spiel kickstarts when ne’er-do-well Jed kills a policeman.

The story, amplified by a dvd and a very extended booklet included in the packaging, echoes the energetic political activism of the Sixties — or tries to, and possibly fails (depending on how big a fan you are). The album cover for Greendale is a map of the fictional town, showing how its centre hugs the Californian coast (the outskirts continue on the back of the album). On the album’s very own website, you can scroll over the map to enlarge certain details relevant to the songs (*):

• Captain John Green’s boat (left of the left hand pier);
• Jed’s seafish apartment (to the right of the boat);
• Scene of the crime (on the far left, where the road that dissects Greendale enters the map);
• Carmichael’s house (between the road and the ocean, near the centre of the map);
• John Lee’s bar, Greendale Mortuary (scene of Carmichael’s service), Sun’s room at rooming house (scene of FBI raid), Greendale High School, Motel (all near the ocean, between the pier and the far right of the map);
• Double ‘E’ Ranch (in the bottom left corner of the map);
• Jail, grandma and grandpa’s house, gallery (all below the main road, near the center of town).

In keeping with Young’s  abrasive, anti-commercial image, the map does not link to a place where you can buy the album. It merely states: This town is now available.

Many thanks to Mr Rutten for sending in this map; does anybody have it in a higher resolution? Also, any extra information on the map’s (and the album’s) back story is more than welcome.

Update: Thanks to all who commented or mailed in regarding a higher-res image; I went with this one, suggested by Tom (comment #4). Click to enlarge further. Also thanks to all who contributed corrections or extra information.

*: this album cover spans only the western end of town; the website covers double as much ground.

Update #2: A few days ago, I was delighted to receive an email from James Mazzeo, the artist who created the original Greendale artwork. He presented me with this fantastic, full-colour version of the Greendale map (cf. inf.), for which I am very grateful – to him and to his associate Joel Radman.

James produced the artwork for Greendale in close collaboration with Neil Young over a 14-month period, but his association with Neil is much older than that particular project. “Neil and I have been friends since 1972,” he writes. “He wrote the song ‘Bandit’ about me.” (Bandit being one of the songs on Greendale, Ed.) The movie accompanying the album also featured James, who played the role of Earl Green.

The fascinatingly multifaceted career of Mr Mazzeo doesn’t stop there. He designed lightshows, and sets for movies and for the stage, road-managed CSNY on their 1974 world tour, worked on Neil Young & Crazy Horse tours across the globe – and even played in a band with Neil himself: “He lived with me in Santa Cruz in 1977 and we had a summer surf band we called ‘Ducks’.” There is more to the picture than meets the eye…

The map James made is featured prominently in the Greendale movie. This full colour version is available as a print on paper or canvas at www.destineliteposters.com.

As I am writing this, I am flicking through the channels on tv – and I fall into the middle of “Don’t Be Denied”, that fantastic Neil Young documentary. If life is an accident, it is a more beautiful one thanks to the music and art of Neil and all those who surround him. Thanks James. Long may you run.

331 – East and West: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

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If you’re American, geographically inclined and a bit of a stickler, this cartographic incongruity is a bit of an annoyance. From the US, the shortest route to what’s conventionally called ‘the East’ is in fact via the west. Going in that direction, you’ll hit the ‘Far East’ before you’re in the ‘Middle East’. And Europe, or at least that part usually included in ‘the West’, lies due east. So East is west, and West is east, in blatant contradiction of what’s probably Rudyard Kipling’s most famous line of verse:

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Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

 

This opening line of The Ballad of East and West is often quoted to underline some insurmountable difference between the two hemispheres. It has almost invariably been misused. Taken as a whole, the Ballad has a subtler message than the one implied in this single verse. It attributes the gap between the two cultures more to nurture than nature. The entire couplet (which also closes the poem) reads:

 

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

 

The poem dates from 1889 and is set in the British Raj. At least here the context is pretty clear: Britain is the West, India the East. But definitions of ’East’ and ‘West’ vary greatly throughout history – and remain fluid. To stick to the British perspective of the poem, where did (and where does) the East begin? The Berlin Wall? Istanbul? The Middle East? Persia? The Indus River? Or at the Greenwich Meridian, placing London in both the eastern and western hemispheres?

 

As it turns out, a general definition for what is East and where West is, one that transcends place and time, is impossible to formulate. This is because both terms are ambiguous to start with. The word West derives from an Proto-Indo-European root [*wes-] that signifies a downward movement, hence associated with the setting sun (cf. Latin vesper, from the same root and meaning both ‘evening’ and ‘West’). The Proto-Indo-European root for East is [*aus-], which has the opposite meaning, i.e. an upward movement (of the sun), dawn.

 

As those etymologies suggest, East and West are but a matter of perspective. East is where the sun rises, West where it sets – as viewed from wherever you are. Which, incidentally, also means that it’s essentially impossible to be ‘in’ the East or West, as both aren’t fixed places, but shift with the horizon.

 

Nevertheless, ‘East’ and ‘West’ have been embedded in our topographies ever since civilisations started naming the world around them. Take Europe for example. The name quite possibly derives from the Phoenician word ereb, meaning ’setting’ (as in ’setting sun’), as it lay to the west of Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon, more or less). Similarly, the term Maghreb, used to describe the North African region at the western edge of the Arab world (i.e. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), is Arab for ’sunset’ or ‘western’, as that is indeed their position from a peninsularly Arab point of view.

 

Point of view is crucial, of course. East and West only exist in relation to someplace else. For many centuries, Europe was the vantage point from which the world was discovered, viewed and named. Columbus sailed west to arrive East in India, but instead stumbled on a new continent. It took a while for the confusion to lift, so the first name for America was the Indies, from 1555 on shifting to West Indies (when the mistake became increasingly apparent). About four decades later, the original Indies (i.e. India and South East Asia) started to be called the East Indies – to distinguish them more clearly from the West Indies. East and West were defined relative to Europe. Or more precisely Western Europe, for even eastern Germans and Balts were called easterlings by mediaeval (Western) chroniclers.

 

That East-West divide within Europe would harden from the beginning of the 20th century, with ‘the West’ used in a geopolitical sense from World War I, denoting the Allies (Britain, France, Italy) as opposed to Germany and Austria-Hungary (although they were known as the Central Powers, not the Eastern ones). ‘The West’, in opposition to the Soviet Union, was first used in 1918, ’the East’ as in the Communist Eastern part of Europe was first recorded in 1951.

 

During the Cold War, ‘the West’ was pretty clearly delineated, including all the NATO members (plus countries economically and culturally close to that alliance’s shared ideals, i.e. Sweden, Switzerland and Austria, but even Australia and New Zealand). ‘The East’, concurrently, consisted of the Warsaw Pact and affiliated Communist societies: China (“The East is Red”), North Korea, Vietnam.

 

The fact that the Cold War is over, not to mention the continuously diminishing global impact of Europe, will continue to chip away at the still dominant eurocentric toponymy of the world. In Australia, that ‘western outpost’ in the Pacific, ties with the ‘mother country’ (and Europe as a whole) have become so distant that Ozzies have begun referring to countries such as Indonesia, China and Japan not as the Far East, but as the Near North.

 

Maybe the same will happen one day in the US, when Europe will no longer be the West but (with a nod to Don Rumsfeld and Europe’s pensioner boom) the Old East and East Asia perhaps will be the New West. Not forgetting that the Chinese have never thought of themselves as eastern or western but, of course, the Middle Kingdom…

 

This map was sent in by Dennis J. Brennan, Sara Harrison, Kristin Kopf, and can be found here at the rather fantastic xkcd.com, ”a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, quoted before on this blog for its amusing map of online communities.

330 – From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents

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Both these maps show the same segment of the southern United States, and demonstrate a similar pattern. Yet each describes a wholly other era and a completely different process.

 

The bottom map dates from 1860 (i.e. the eve of the Civil War), and indicates where cotton was produced at that time, each dot representing 2,000 bales of the stuff. Cotton was King back then, and mainly so in the densely cultivated border area between Louisiana and Mississippi, and in an equally dense band of cotton cultivation starting west of the Mississippi-Alabama line, tapering out across Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Other cotton centres are the areas around Memphis and what appears to be Lawrenceburg in southern Tennessee.

 

The top map dates from 2008, and shows the results of the recent presidential election, on county level. Blue counties voted for Obama, red ones for McCain (darker hues representing larger majorities). In spite of Obama’s national victory, and barring Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, all Southern states (i.e. all states formerly belonging to the Confederacy) went for McCain. The pattern of pro-Obama counties in those southern states corresponds strikingly with the cotton-picking areas of the 1860s, especially along the Louisiana-Mississippi and Mississippi-Alabama borders (the pattern corresponds less strikingly and deviates significantly elsewhere).

 

The link between these two maps is not causal, but correlational, and the correlation is African-Americans. Once they were the slaves on whom the cotton economy had to rely for harvesting. Despite an outward migration towards the Northern cities, their settlement pattern now still closely corresponds to that of those days.

During the Democratic primary, many African-American voters supported Hillary Clinton, thinking it unlikely Barack Obama would win the nomination, let alone the presidency. When it became apparent that Obama had a good shot at the nomination (and thereafter at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself), their support for Obama became near monolithic. As it turns out, president-elect Obama won with the an overall support of 53%, but that includes over 90% of black voters (1).

 

And while their votes did not swing their states towards ‘their’ (2) candidate, the measure in which black residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina voted for Obama is remarkable in that this particular voting pattern still corresponds with settlement patterns of almost a century and a half ago.

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Many thanks to Paul Downey for sending in this map, found here.

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UPDATE #1:  I received an overlay of both maps from Mark Root-Wiley: “The borders do not line up perfectly but came closer than I thought they would. The top layer had to be made semitransparent in order to see the blue vs. red breakdown in Arkansas/Lousiana/Mississippi, but I think it’s pretty useful.  The correlation was even stronger than I thought.” It looks great. Thanks, Mark!

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UPDATE #2: The original juxtaposition of the two maps was the work of Allen Gathman (explained here, and done here).

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UPDATE #3: In comment #96, C. Neal explains how the voting pattern can be related to even more antique antecedents than Antebellum agriculture – the Late Cretaceous Period, no less. Go to the comment for link to the post…

 

(1) Of white voters, only 43% voted for Obama; since Lyndon B. Johnson, no Democratic candidate for the highest office has ever garnered more than half the votes of European-Americans.

(2) Obama self-identifies as black, but with a white mother and a Kenyan father, shares no personal, historical bond with the issue of black slavery in the US.

329 – Chaffinch Map of Scotland

Chaffinch Map of Scotland is a poem written in 1965 by Edwin Morgan (b. 1920), Poet Laureate of Glasgow (1999) and (since 2004) Scottish National Poet (1). The work looks deceptively simple, while in fact it is a cleverly multilayered combination of poetry, cartography, ornithology, linguistics, and maybe just a hint of Scottish nationalism (2).

 

The chaffinch (3), or spink, is a small songbird of the Fringillidae family, and can be distinguished by its greenish rump and white bars on its wings (the male additionally by its blue-grey cap and reddish belly). This most common of European finch species is noted for its powerful and typical song. Chaffinches have an innate ability to sing, but also adapt to the songs of ‘teachers’ in their vicinity. This explains the curious incidence of regional variation in their song, a trait their song shares with human speech.

 

This poem is a map of Scotland, or at least those areas in Scotland where the chaffinch is endemic. It shows the different names used in Scottish dialects for chaffinch, varying from chaffinch in the north over shielyfaw in the middle to britchie in the south. It is interesting to note that the generic term finch is an onomatopoeia, raising the intriguing possibility that the regional variation in human dialect terms for chaffinch somehow mimicks the dialects in the birdsong itself. Which conjures up the fairy-tale notion of animals (i.c. birds) initiating humans in the secrets of language.

 

Many thanks to Raynor Ganan for sending me a link to the page on (in?) his Ragbag.

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(1) also called Makar, i.e. ‘maker’, after mediaeval antecedents.
(2) or maybe a deeply ironical mocking thereof.

(3) that’s Fringilla coelebs, if you prefer to speak Linnaean.

328 – Fuzzy Britain, and Truth in Maps

“(…) for the last two years, I’ve been taking pictures of Britain on world maps,” writes Ben Terrett, graphic designer and blogger at Noisy Decent Graphics. Well, not too bad, if that’s the only thing that’s wrong with you (1).

There is, however, a method behind his madness: “About two years ago, I was looking at a map of the world and noticed that Britain seemed disproportionately large. My companion remarked that this was because in the days of yore, whoever was drawing the map always made their country look bigger and more important.”

On the surface of it, this is a reasonable enough assumption. Were it not that the carto-spatial expansion of most countries is rather constricted by their land borders. Imagine – short of actual, genuine irredentism, that is – continental countries spilling over into their neighbours on each other’s maps the way the Hulk bursts out of his t-shirts (2). Things could get messy pretty quickly in a very real-world, diplomatic incident (or even Hulk-movie) kind of way.

But Britain is, as in so many other cases, the exception to this rule. As an island nation, it is bordered only by the sea (3) and as a former Empire, it has a more than favourable sense of its own place in history (and geography). It is thus eminently suited for cartographical inflation.  

Britain’s aquatic Einzelgang does indeed allow for quite some variation, as Mr Terrett’s research demonstrates. The variation is however not limited to size, as demonstrated by this overlay of 14 different cartographies of Britain (compensated for scale differences). The composite map is quite fuzzy indeed.

Mr Terrett concludes: “This isn’t a cartography blog and I know some of these maps are over-stylised for a reason, but I want to make a wider point about graphic designers and the assumptions we make and how easily they are accepted. If you look at all the maps (separately), they all look kind of OK. When I put them all together, it looks like madness. Like people taking liberties with the truth.”

Well, this is a cartography blog, and I’d like to go on a bit about the the relationship between truth and maps. The point being, in short, that all maps are lies – they are 2D renderings of a 3D reality, invariably containing some form of deviation of the ‘truth’. It’s almost as if this was cartography’s version of the Original Sin. And yet maps can’t be all lies, not even mostly lies: they must refer in some reliable way to the outside world, or be useless (4).

But the disconnect between map and territory goes deeper than that one untransferable dimension. Even if an exact 3D, 1 on 1 map of a territory were made, how truthful could it be? It would only represent reality without actually being it. If the lay of the land would change, which would be wrong: the reality of the terrain, or its mapped representation?

The map-territory relation is explored further in this Wikipedia article. And in Jose Luis Borges’ famous, though very short story, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in which a map is devised on such a scale that it covers the charted empire completely, voiding the map of its purpose.

Could one not conclude, paradoxically, from this story that maps are only useful insofar as they do deviate from the truth? Even while retaining enough truth to be reliable? What an unsettling thought – and it’s already way, way past my bedtime…

Many thanks to McBain and Eliana MacDonald, who provided me with the link to the relevant page of the aforementioned blog.

 

(1) Pot kettle black, I know.

(2) as Kermit the Frog, also verdantly challenged, once remarked: “It isn’t easy being green”.

(3) The UK nowadays has a land border, of course: with Ireland – but only since that republic’s independence from the UK in the early 20th century. Other British land borders are/were either colonial, or medieval (in France).

(4) Unless they are strange maps of course, in which case this definition may be defenestrated.

327 – City Maps As A Rorschach Test

This map, showing the surface and population of selected world cities, is outdated by over two decades. It was published in the Dallas Morning News on 9 June 1983, since when the population of Dallas itself, for example, has grown from just over 900,000 to well beyond 1.2 million inhabitants (2007).

Some of the shapes of the cities shown here might be outdated too; as they grow, cities tend to expand into and annex their environs. The tentacularity of London in this map is a good indication of that process – but has itself become obsolete: this shape no longer corresponds with any present-day depiction of the city.

What remains striking about this map, even though we’re talking about populations and surfaces of 25 years ago, are the relative population densities of the cities. Dallas and Houston are comparable to each other in population and both are in the same category, surface-wise, as London and New York. But the population of the latter two cities is roughly 6 to 8 times higher than either Houston or Dallas, indicating that these have a much lower population density. A possible explanation: the automobile (and the flat prairie they were built upon) has allowed both Texan metropolises to sprawl in ways unimaginable just over a century ago, and impossible even today in more constrained surroundings.

The two other European cities depicted here (apart from London, i.e. Amsterdam and Rome) have city centres that are smaller and more densely populated than their American cousins. About equal in size to Rome (and to each other) are Toronto, Montreal and Boston, but they are much less packed with people (2.6 million for Rome, between half a million and 1.2 million for the other cities). Chicago’s sprawl and density puts it somewhere between Dallas and London. DC and San Francisco are special, in that they are very constrained surface-wise (legally in DC’s case, physically by the Bay and the Ocean in San Francisco’s case). This ‘pressure cooker’ circumstance causes their populations to be much denser than in either of the sprawling Texan cities.

All of which is very interesting, but this is not what first drew me to this map. It is interesting in a more primordial, psychologically more revealing way, as a Rorschach inkblot test. That test, as you will recall from any number of treatments of the subject in popular culture, allows an analyst to make deductions about a subject’s personality and emotions by the way he or she interprets the shapes of random inkblots.

The method is still used, but controversial, as suggestibility, bias and other aspects of subjectivity might prevent a valid “reading” of the result. As is best summarised by this classic Rorschach joke:

A man goes to a psychiatrist. To start things off, the psychiatrist suggests they start with a Rorschach test. He holds up the first picture and asks the man what he sees.

“A man and a woman making love in a park,” the man replies. The psychiatrist holds up the second picture and asks the man what he sees. “A man and a woman making love in a boat.” He holds up the third picture. “A man and a woman making love at the beach.”

The psychiatrist says, “It looks like you have a preoccupation with sex.” The man replies, “Well, you’re the one with the dirty pictures.”

Here’s what my imagination makes of some of the city shapes presented here (feel free to add your own):

• Dallas: an overweight, angry, club-wielding caveman plagued by scrotal elephantiasis.
• London: a double-headed eagle clubbed to death by an overweight, angry Texan caveman.
• Chicago: a one-toothed Bart Simpson looking west.
• Washington DC: a Moai statue (as on Easter Island) tilted downward to appear even more introspective (a la Penseur by Auguste Rodin).

Incidentally, Rorschach inkblot tests were named after the Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, who devised the first such test in 1921. Mr Rorschach’s family name derives from an eponymous Swiss town, on the southern shore of Lake Constance. A map of Rorschach unfortunately only demonstrates that it looks like nothing at all…

Many thanks to Robert Allison for providing this link to the map.

326 – Where Is Obamaland?

 

 

According to Barack Obama, “there are no blue states, no red states, only the United States of America”. That is the rhetoric one should expect from a president-elect, intent on overcoming the inevitable polarisation of an election campaign. Given the oppositional nature of politics in a democracy, however, it seems likely that a divide between Obamaland and McCain Country will continue to exist. But where exactly are these two political entities?

In 2004, a satirical map of Jesusland and the United States of Canada made the rounds of the internet, showing a red-state heartland bounded by a few coastal and northern blue states, joined up with the US’s northern neighbour Canada. That country’s perceived liberal political culture is seen by some as more in line with the ‘leftist’ leanings of the Democratic party, which dominates the blue states.

This year around, Jesusland has taken a beating, and the victorious blue states no longer feel as if they need northern comfort. Nine states have switched from red to blue: Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado in the west; Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the south, and Indiana, Ohio and Iowa in the midwest. As a result, Obamaland consists of four separate chunks of territory, with West Virginia awkwardly poking its two panhandles into the largest of those four areas.

Interestingly, McCain Country still consists of one contiguous territory, but if the freshly defeated senator from Arizona would want to visit the outgoing president Bush on his Texas ranch, he would need to drive all the way north to Cheney Territory (i.e. Wyoming) and then south again through Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to avoid ‘blue’ country. East of the Mississippi, and with the exception of Florida, redness is a southern thing. The northernmost ‘red’ point on the map, east of the Mississippi, is the aforementioned northern panhandle of West Virginia.

Obamaland fragments into a thousand little pieces when the map’s focus shifts to victories at the county rather than the state level. Obama tends to win in densely populated urban centres, that look isolated amidst all the rural red, which now reaches its northern zenith east of the Mississippi in upstate Maine. That little red island in a blue sea is the reverse of most of the rest of the map.

Obamaland’s terra firma is fragmented into a few large chunks: in the Northeast, west of the Great Lakes, a cluster in the southwest, and clinging to the West Coast.The rest are smaller archipelagoes and islands in an ocean of red. 

 

These two cartograms and many others analysing the outcome of the 2008 US presidential election can be found on this excellent page at the University of Michigan, maintained by Mark Newman of the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Many thanks all those who provided me with a link to this page.

325 – What If Italy Had Won the War?

 

 

Rarely is the question asked: What if Italy had won the Second World War? The more frequently asked question is: What if Germany had won the war? Italy may have been the birthplace of fascism (1) but in the original Axis of Evil (2), the Italians clearly were the junior partners to the Germans – ideologically, economically and militarily.

Fascist Italy nevertheless has an expansionist track record distinct from Germany’s: Mussolini’s stated aim was to restore the Roman Empire (or build something similar to it), and to reclaim the Mediterranean as an Italian Mare Nostrum (3). He never quite managed to do that, but did cobble together something of an African empire, conquering Lybia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and part of Somalia.

Closer to home, some of Italy’s irredentist (4) frustrations were satisfied by the annexation of neighbouring territories, such as the area around Nice after the fall of France. Expansion in the Balkans and Greece was less successful, and the Germans had to come to the aid of the Italians to consolidate the Axis hold on the area. After the war, Italy obviously lost all its colonies and extra territories.

These two maps are an answer to the Italian version of the most frequently asked What if-question about the Second World War. They are taken from Italian writer Enrico Brizzi’s novel L’inattesa piega degli eventi (‘The Unexpected Unfolding of Events’), which describes an allohistorical world in which fascist Italy breaks with Hitler in time to be counted as a victor, come Germany’s eventual defeat. The alternate 1960s Italy described in the novel is still ruled by an ageing Duce (5), a situation immediately reminiscent of Spain, which was the fiefdom of generalissimo Francisco Franco, the victor of the Spanish Civil war, from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s.

In the book, Mussolini has kicked out the royal family and reduced the role of the Church, firmly establishing his hold over power. The colonies have been promoted to the status of associated republics, but this is largely a formality. The story in Brizzi’s book follows the travels of an Italian sports writer in these African possessions of Italy, whence he will return with a different view of the Madrepatria (‘Motherland’).

These maps show Italy’s territorial acquisitions in Europe and Africa. In Europe, Italy as grown to the detriment of France (annexing Corsica, now also an associated republic, the area around Nice – Nizza in Italian – and the Savoy), Austria and Malta (also an associated republic). In Africa, the Italian Empire controls Eritrea, Ethiopia and the larger part of what today is Somalia. The British rule over Somaliland in the north, an enclave in Italian East Africa. There is something going on with part of the Savoy, but both my eyesight and my Italian are too deficient to figure out exactly what it is.

Many thanks to Valerio Taubmann for sending in these maps. More on Mr Brizzi’s book on this page of his website (in Italian).

1. Mussolini’s power grab in 1922 preceded Hitler’s by more than a decade.
2. Rome-Berlin, as of the signing of a friendship treaty between Italy and Germany in October 1936; Rome-Berlin-Tokyo, as of the signing of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. The Axis was thereafter sometimes also called RoBerTo in Italy.
3. ‘Our Sea’, a common term for the sea when all its shores were Roman possessions.
4. Irredentism, i.e.the desire to annex territory based on historical and/or ethnic grounds, gets its name from Italia irredenta, a term to describe territories held by the Austro-Hungarian empire between the unification of Italy and the end of the First World War, and claimed by Italy.
5. Fascist leaders love epithetons. Hitler’s was Fuehrer, Franco liked to be called Caudillo and Mussolini was nuts about Duce, which means something like ‘leader’ or ‘guide’.

324 – The North America Nebula

 

The constellations visible in the northern hemisphere, including the twelve signs of the Zodiac, owe their names to the Babylonians and the Greeks. Only during the last few hundred years did European explorers travel far south enough to observe the constellations in the southern hemisphere. These often carry more ‘modern’ names, such as Telescopium, Microscopium and Octans.

The discovery and naming of nebulae (i.e. interstellar clouds of star-forming matter) is similarly recent, and some also carry names that could not have been given by the Ancient Greeks or Babylonians, such as the Boomerang nebula, Barnard’s Loop, or this one, the North America nebula. This nebula, discovered in 1786 by British astronomer William Herschel, was named by his German colleague Max Wolf, because of its remarkable similarity to the North American continent – especially the outlines of Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico and Florida.

These areas are in reality a jumble of gas, dust and newly formed stars, and they are lit up by the brightness of these young stars. The North America Nebula covers an area more than ten times the size of a full moon, but is not bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye. It spans about 50 light years, at a distance of about 1,500 light years towards the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan), more specifically Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation. The North America Nebula also carries the less imaginative names of NGC 7000 and Caldwell 20.

Many thanks to Matthew Kehrt for drawing my attention to this nebula; picture and some information are reproduced from this page at the fantastic Astronomy Picture of the Day website.