In Politics Evils Should Be Remedied Not Revenged

 So said Napoleon III, who is my next suggestion as the historical failure on whom Trump seems to be modelling himself.

It's not the barnet this time, just the same old trope of declaring war on someone who has been preparing for exactly that and intends to use it as an excuse to unite currently independent states under their rule.

Other things Napoleon III did that may or may not have echoes this time:

• Promised, but failed, to Make France Great Again
• Carried out a coup when the constitution barred him from standing for re-election
• Declared himself Emperor when he decided that being President wasn't grand enough
• Tried to buy Luxembourg from the King of the Netherlands
• Engaged in a disastrous adventure in Mexico
• Lowered tariffs and opened France to imported goods [Hang on a minute, who put this one in?]

Fun fact: the Empress Eugenie found sex with him disgusting, and refused to sleep with him again after providing him with an heir.

It was, of course, Napoleon III about whom Marx was writing when he said "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

PotCXXVIpouri

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority, 

Most ignorant of what he's most assured, 

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven 

As make the angels weep.

 -William Shakespeare

Now, I don't wish to live in a world led by China any more than anyone else does. However, having said that, I am certainly revelling in the Schadenfreude of seeing Uncle Sam have his trousers taken down and his arse spanked.

Moving on. I am currently about half way through a month long wargaming hiatus. There is talk of another Peninsular War campaign when we resume, and this time we have been promised some actual victory conditions which in turn means that this time it might end during the lifetime of all those participating. 

In the meantime I have been to the opera. This time last year I promised a review of a performance of the 1881 version of Simon Boccanegra, and here it is. It was just as good as the performance I saw of the 1857 version. My companion for the afternoon - not the most ardent of aficionados despite my encouragements - declared it the best opera she had ever seen. Mind you she also claimed to understand the plot, which is hard to believe. The issue isn't so much what they do as why they do it.

Also highly enjoyable if a tad difficult to follow in detail, was 'It is I, Seagull', Lucy Mellors one-woman show about - possibly - self esteem, the objectification of women, chasing one's dream with added opera and space-travel. The last of those comes through the story of Valentina Tereshkova, and Ms Mellors does a pretty good job of representing cosmonaut selection and training and then the orbiting of the earth with nothing more than some physical theatre, some audience participation and a few arias. I'm not sure how accurate her version of Tereshkova's story was, and she doesn't touch on her current position as a Putin-apologist politician, but as I'm old enough to recall the events it brought back memories of the mid-Sixties. Even in those days the US didn't have things all its own way. Tereshkova, Vostok 6, was in space for longer than the cumulative total of all the Americans who had been to space before her, and of course Valery Bykovsky was also in orbit in Vostok 5 at the same time.

What Goes Up...

 "There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or in the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history." - Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur

It's A Little Messed Up

 

The Current 'Situation'

 “TARIFF, n. A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.” - Ambrose Pierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Your bloggist has always viewed this blog - and also the work blog which I used to write before I transcended being a wage slave - as an alternative to simply chuntering to myself when something in the world irritates me. The recent behaviour of the Tangerine Tosser has clearly met  that criterion, but I have previously resisted the temptation to write about it, mainly because pretty much everyone in the UK (except a few outliers whom Private Eye refers to as 'Lone Derangers') feels the same as me anyway.

However, there are two elements that I now feel impelled to cover. Firstly, the likely effect on the boardgame publishing, distribution and retail industry; i.e. it will die and die quickly. I won't elaborate on the details - you can easily find it all explained elsewhere on the interweb - but it arises because the large majority of games are made in China and because the US is a significant slice of the global market, and  of course an even larger slice of the English-speaking market. Bear in mind if you do seek out and read such pieces that many of them were written when the tariffs were at 40%. None of the ameliorations suggested, cross-subsidies being prominent among them, will work at a 145% tariff level. The only technical point I will make - briefly donning my Finance Director's hat - is that the cashflow impact on working capital is just as important as increased cost/reduced profitability. I am aware of one US publisher which has already laid off the majority of its staff; it's inevitable that others will follow. I focus here on boardgames because I play a lot, but really it's just a microcosm of hundreds of other sectors, all of which will be negatively affected.

In the case of boardgames, what will the effect on me and my playmates be? Very little if truth be told. We have more than enough games on the shelf to last us for the rest of our lives and beyond. Indeed, the wife of the member of our small but perfectly formed group who is most prone to backing crowdfunding campaigns is reported to be elated.

My record in making predictions is patchy at best, but I'm going to make one regardless. Long before physical trade impacts of the type outlined above start to impact at the macroeconomic level there will be a sudden financial crisis, of the sort we saw in 2008. As this week's Economist puts it in fairly understated manner: "markets are starting to doubt whether Mr Trump can govern America competently or consistently".

Secondly, I note that it has become common to compare the Mango Mussolini to despised political figures from the past. That's obviously not the sort of thing that this blog goes in for. But if it were, I think Arthur Scargill is the comparison which I would draw, and not just for the preposterous combovers affected by both men. It's more to do with their decisions to take on implacable opponents, ones who were never going to back down, and to do so when those opponents had had years to prepare for the only tactic that our anti-heroes had in their armoury. Admittedly, in this scenario Xi Jinping may well object vehemently to being compared to Margaret Thatcher - and who could blame him?

Let's end with a quote from a man who saw all this coming:

"...we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat." - Karl Marx

Come. It Is Time To Keep Your Appointment With The Wicker Man.

 If most of you will excuse the self-indulgence, this is a message specifically for the reader who has recently been reading a particular subset of posts from a few years back; you know who you are. Please leave a message explaining the sudden interest.

"Much has been said of the strumpets of yore

Of wenches and bawdy house queens by the score 

But I sing of a baggage that we all adore"

Games, we must!

 Culture has been to the fore at the Casa Epictetus recently, in a tasty salmagundi of film, gospel music, calligraphy, West End musicals and, er, boxing. I might return to those, I might not. But there has also been some wargaming.

We had a couple of goes at another Tabletop Teaser, although I have mislaid the note I made of which one specifically we played. The photo above is from the second night, but broadly shows the set-up for both games. The French must seize the river crossings - there's another bridge in the village - before the Spanish reserves arrive and then beat off the counterattack when they do so. 

Or at least that's the concept. On the first evening the Spanish reserves failed to arrive at all. Still, these things happen, so we swapped sides, made a couple of small adjustments which we thought would improve things and went again. The Spanish reserves once more failed to arrive. Oh well. I'm reasonably confident that the fault was ours rather than Charles Grant's, and we are moving on to a different teaser this week, with - I believe - an ancient setting of some sort. 

Games, must we?

 In my last post I said that the opening scene of 'Owen Wingrave' contained a reference to Austerlitz. I nearly made a smug comment to the effect that I was probably the only person in the audience that picked it up. Two things stopped me. Firstly, the realisation that I was probably the only person in the audience that cared at all. And secondly, the possibility that I might have deduced the wrong battle anyway. There was no mention of the battle by name, simply a few oblique clues. One of these was the name of General Vandamme.

As it happens the villain in Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest', played by James Mason, is also Vandamm - no 'e', but close enough.

Two days before seeing the opera, I went to see Wise Children's stage version of the film, and am happy to report a return to form for the company. It's a whimsical crowd-pleaser rather than a straight thriller, but there is intelligence in the way that verbal humour, physical comedy and audience interaction are substituted for the darkness of the original. And then there's the action scenes. The film featured locations such as the UN building, various trains and stations, a cornfield being buzzed by a crop-spraying aircraft and, of course, Mount Rushmore; all are transposed to the stage with imagination and invention. It's well worth seeing.

Fact of the day: Eva Marie Saint, who played Eve Kendall in the 1959 film is, astonishingly, still alive and is the oldest living Academy Award winner.

False Plumes And Pride

 And so to the opera. Regular readers will know that going to the opera is as close to my heart as indulging in a bit of toy soldier action. I was delighted therefore to attend a performance which included both. The figures - understandably impossible to see in any detail - were present in the opening scene of Britten's 'Owen Wingrave' when our 'hero' and his friend are being instructed in the strategic lessons to be learned from the battle of Austerlitz. Sadly, there is no room in the libretto to include what these lessons might be, but we do learn that Napoleon was delighted with the outcome.

Less delighted with things is Wingrave himself, who subsequently rejects his family's plan for him. This is that he kills and quite possibly dies for the glory of Queen, country and the honour of the Wingrave name as countless generations have done before him. That's the countless generations haunting him in the picture. 

I'd never seen it before - it's rarely performed - but rather liked it. Unlike many operas the plot is very straightforward with literally everyone else except the title character being an unsympathetic baddie including, oddly but effectively, the house in which they all live. The piece was originally commissioned by the BBC to be shown on television, something which would never now happen, thereby neatly encapsulating the level of cultural decline in the UK during the last half century.

Obviously pacifism is a more complex issue than as portrayed here. I have never read the Henry James story on which it based, but don't really expect to find subtlety there either. The name 'Owen' means 'young soldier' and 'Wingrave' is clearly, well, 'win grave'. Possibly if Britten had not run away to the US during the second world war, but had stayed in the UK and lived out his principles in the context of a society under attack he may have been able to add some more nuanced touches.

.

Boardgaming Q1 2025

 The usual list of mostly new-to-me games:

Antike: Yet another game of civilisation building around the Mediterranean. This one hinges on when you switch from peaceful coexistence to destroying your opponents temples. It was fine.

The Downfall of Pompeii: You can not only overwhelm your opponents with lava flows, but then you get to throw their pieces into the volcano.

Fit To Print: A real time spatial awareness game; that's a lot of red flags for me.

Flip 7: A rather good push-your-luck filler.

Francis Drake: I had played this once before, about ten years ago. This time it lasted about four hours and I lost because the very last tile I turned over read 3 instead of 1 or 2. So, either mail-bitingly tight or entirely luck based depending on your point of view.

Fromage: Ostensibly about French cheese, but really about the revolving board mechanic. However, the latter works well and it's a good game.

Harmonies: I had heard that this was the new Cascadia, but it's somewhat more complex than that game. It was OK, but I won't be seeking it out.

Landmarks: It's a cross between Codenames and Survive. Not for me.

Metro: Not bad, but it seems as if someone said let's add some unnecessarily complicated scoring to Tsuro for a laugh. 

Oregon: I quite liked this. It's a fairly abstract tile-laying game.

Sausage Sizzle!: Fairly amusing Australian barbecue themed Yahtzee.

SCOUT: This filler is a few years old, but has a bit of a current buzz for some reason. It's OK.

SETI: Search For Extra-terrestrial Intelligence: Another game that involves gimmicky revolving bits and pieces. In this case they are thematic, representing the solar system. Other parts aren't quite so realistic, such as landing on Jupiter. However, it's a good, crunchy, heavyish Euro game.

Thunder Road Vendetta: I'm always on the look out for games that I think wargamers would like. Some wargamers might like this - there's lots of aggression and destruction - but others might not - it's basically chaos. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think we've only scratched the surface of what could happen.

The pick of the bunch out of this lot is SETI, although Thunder Road Vendetta is good way to wind down after more intellectually challenging games.