André Gide liked to scandalize enquirers by saying: "Je ne suis pas tapette, monsieur, je suis pédéraste!" ("I am not a fairy, Sir, I am a pederast!") In a similar spirit I am sometimes tempted to assert: "I'm not really a conservative — more of a reactionary." It's not true, though. I wonder if it really can be. It is all very well to speak of standing athwart history crying "Stop!" but history will not stop, and there are some respects in which even the most sincerely conservative of us would not wish it to.

John Derbyshire asks a good question - how can one claim to be a reactionary in today's world? There are good reasons why reaction is tempiting and we might want the world to be like it used to, at least in some ways. One recent GNXP post describes how many of our instincts are poorly adapted to living in a free economy and electing our rulers - an idea I've mentioned before. That doesn't necessarily mean we should live in a world like the one we are adapted to, though - a few days earlier another post on GNXP reminded us of how that world really sucked in a lot of ways compared to what we have today. That makes for some chaos and confusion, but I'd rather deal with that and (to pick an easy example) be able to eat five kilos of meat a week, you know? It sure as hell is worth it.

I do like to call myself a reactionary, though. I like to complain about the American Revolution and the October Revolution in the same breath. That doesn't mean I want to live in the world before the American Revolution, but I think a world in which the rebels lost that one would be a better world. I might not be a "true" reactionary, then, only a political one. As Mencius Moldbug once wrote, "I feel no hesitation in informing you with absolute confidence that the common concept of progress, which perhaps you are operating under, is a lie and a delusion and a snare. At least inasmuch as that term applies to the problem of human government, and not physics, oil painting, or backgammon. There is no reason to think the political designs of 2007 are any better than those of 1907, 1807, or 7."

I like progress. I like the modern world. I just don't like progress in politics, that's all. I don't think there's any contradiction there. After all, many of the most progressive progressives are extremely reactionary when it comes to everything except politics.

From a band's point of view, it theoretically makes no sense to play your own songs for any reason other than an ego trip or impressing others - there are, after all, plenty of great songs already written. No matter how good you are at writing your own, they're not going to be better than the best of all the songs written by millions of different people in the past. You should play better songs instead of worse ones, right? Division of labor will make the product better, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. As Dennis Dutton wrote and I keep repeating, in music, as in all art, people aren't looking only for great melodies, lyrics, arrangements and performances, but also for a glimpse into your soul. With a cover band you get a glimpse into both the author's and the performer's soul, which is slightly confusing and therefore more difficult to trust. If you want to learn something about other human beings, unfiltered information is the best. So, if you want to learn about human beings from music, then a great performance of a great song can actually be an inferior product to a worse performance of a less interesting song if the latter is performed by its author. It won't be that way every time, of course. Authentic crap is still crap. At the upper end of the scale, Cole Porter didn't have much of a voice and his songs couldn't reach their full potential unless performed by others.

Is this interest in authenticity a new cultural phenomenon? After all one of the big historical trends in music over the past 50+ years has been the increased prominence of people performing their own material. I don't think any kind of shift in culture is necessary to explain that; culture has just been catching up with technology. Hearing Haydn's orchestra perform his composition with Haydn himself on violin was always more desirable than another orchestra playing them, but back then very few people could actually come to the performances, and just getting the orchestra to play in your summer palace was a huge pain in the ass for everyone. We've been gradually working our way towards making it possible for more people to hear a specific individual's performance since. Better roads and transportation, louder instruments and larger concert halls with better acoustics were all big steps in this direction. Later came amplification which was huge - it not only allowed many thousands of people to hear a single performance, it also allowed bands to shrink vastly and their equipmnent to become much sturdier which all made extensive touring far more practical. Recording, broadcasting and distribution technology followed, and now hearing Haydn's orchestra would be a trivial matter. Hell, I can easily hear songs written by middle-class teenagers on the other side of the world.

I don't think we're quite finished with the shift yet, though. Weddings and corporate parties used to require a live band, but now many of those gigs are going to high-end DJs - who are largely playing material performed by its authors. Sure, classical music, a lot of pop and Nashville country still maintain the division of labor, and hip-hop still has a strong division between producers and MCs - though it's sine qua non for MCs to write their own rhymes, so that part of the work is never split. I think the future will feature even fewer professional songwriters, more MCs making their own beats, and fewer cover bands.

Does that mean cover bands will disappear completely? Nah. I think we're just headed towards a different equilibrium where more people than before perform their own songs, but big numbers of symphony orchestras, professional songwriters and cover bands still remain. There will also be plenty of situations where music creates communion with other human souls but focusing on the entire community around us rather than the specific souls of artists - church music, children's music, military marches, national anthems etc. Still, I am something of a dying breed. I could sit around moaning that this means my enemies are taking over, or that people don't really want the best performances of the best songs, but really, the listeners get more out of the songs. When all's said and done, this is a change for the better. At worst I'll just have to get more gigs accompanying female songwriters.

Baiting people into arguing about whether Stalin or Hitler was more evil is always fun, and here is an interesting way to argue that I haven't thought about before:

Fascism and Nazism were, of course, extreme forms of nationalism and the mass murders Nazi and fascist regimes committed were justified on the grounds that they were necessary to advance the interests of racially or ethnically defined peoples. Obviously, most nationalist governments do not commit mass murder on that scale. This is one reason why nationalism is not quite as pernicious as socialism. Nearly all full-blown socialist regimes that have lasted for any length of time have engaged in mass murder; "only" a substantial minority of nationalist regimes have done the same.

Now... assuming that leaders are responsible for the deaths under their regimes, and that the whole mass murder thing qualifies as evil, that leads to one conclusion. Hitler was eviler than Stalin because Hitler was unusually murderous by nationalist standards; Stalin wasn't particularly evil (at least not by the low standards of politicians) he was just implementing socialism, which doesn't require unusually evil leaders to kill millions of people.

The best thing about that arugment is that it'll piss off pretty much anyone on either side. It works almost as well as "So... do people in your country hate Gypsies?" if you want to get intellectualists to start a drunken brawl.

HT: Bryan Caplan

Once in a while I run across someone who argues that civilization is in decline and, as an argument, contrasts the music of, say, Mozart against Kayne West. That's just plain silly. A reasonable comparison might be between Mozart and Harry Partch, and indeed countless words have been written about whether serious art music, and highbrow culture in general, ain't what they used to be. But what about the music us regular folk enjoy? Is Kayne West really worse than his predecessors from 50 or 500 years ago? I don't really know enough about West or his roots to answer that question well, but I can do a similar comparison for a style I'm more familiar with - country music. It is a direct descendant of what is now called old-time music or old-timey, which in turn is descended from the folk music of the British Isles, and it's certainly not an example of high culture.

So how do the musical tastes of American rednecks compare to those of their peasant ancestors? We want to look at the longest possible period, so let's start with a song with some really old roots - "The Devil And The Farmer's Wife". A song has to be pretty good to survive being passed down orally for so many centuries.

Moving forward in time and across the Atlantic, "Soldier's Joy" is one of the old-time standards that all fiddlers must know.

In the 20th century we come to what we actually call country music - let's pick "I Walk The Line" as an example.

Finally, as an example of a big modern country hit, let's take "Angry All The Time". This gives us four songs which entertained American rednecks and their ancestors over the course of several centuries. Sure, it's only four data points, and this isn't a scientific investigation, but at least the comparison isn't complete nonsense.

I see no big obvious decline. If anything the more modern songs have more complicated arrangements and take more skill to perform. It looks like the entertainment choices of "the herd" have gotten a little more sophisticated over the past 1000 years. It's very possible that our elites have bought into a ridiculous set of ideas about music and art in the Romantic period, and all high art has gone off the rails since then, but that's their problem. Those of us who don't give a crap about high art seem to be doing just fine, thank you.

Steve Sailer writes what quite a few commenters say is one of his best posts ever, about how our oppressors freed themselves a few decades ago.

So, the top level of our society continues to argue for the breaking down of old restrictions, whether on the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman or that their should be limits on debt and interest rates. After all, individualistic self-determination works fine for the upper middle class.

From this perspective, the 1960s cultural revolution look like an Elites Liberation movement, in which Unitarians, Congregationalists, Jews, Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, and similar products of centuries of bourgeois culture decided that they, personally, could get by without the old rules, which, indeed, many of them could. Moreover, they were tired of being expected to be role models of starchy behavior for the proles.

But the tenor of the times demanded that this Elites Lib movement be cloaked in egalitarian and civil rights rhetoric and policies (such as refocusing AFDC from Roosevelt's aim of supporting widows to supporting single mothers, because we wouldn't want to discriminate against blacks), with disastrous effects on people toward the bottom of society, especially blacks.

In the old days the aristocracy believed they were better than the peasants and ruled them harshly. The peasants suffered much at their hands. These days our elites believe that we're really just like them, only with less money and education, and many of them genuinely seem to want to be nice to us. The end result... well, it's still about the same, isn't it?

I don't know what the solution might be, or even if there is one. That's fine, though. We've made it just fine through thousands of years of being ruled by power-hungry thieves and/or clueless incompetents. We can make it through thousands more, I'm sure.

A series of allegations including murder, weapons smuggling and the deliberate slaughter of civilians have been levelled against the founder of Blackwater, the security company being investigated for shooting deaths in Iraq.

...

The separate 72-page motion, which cites the affidavits, also accused Blackwater guards of boasting of kills, taking mind-altering drugs, steroids and using child prostitutes.

Sorry, world. Back in the old days we Europeans did pillaging a lot better. Our ancient and closely-knit tribes, including but not limited to the Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Greeks, Celts, Norsemen and Goths would perpetually hone their battle skills by invading their cousins down the road if they were bored, or when it was chilly outside.

Whenever such a skirmish occurred, heroic men with gleaming swords and shields would frighten the local population into a frenzy, indiscriminately tearing up the place beneath the blazing sun. No artillery strikes, no air support, no peace-keeping, no aid missions, just rushing into some faraway land to kill, steal, burn, vandalise and rape, possibly justifying it all with a religion. Then they'd hop into their boats and be back to the hut in time for mead and feasting, perhaps with a bard telling them about how awesome they all were for going out raping all day.

In the midst of this our crusading skills would become ever more adept, and our tenacity ever greater, until the best cultures of Europe turned it into an art form. At this point we quickly got bored of killing each other, so we banded together and started killing foreign people instead. Not only did this turn out to be really easy, but it was also a lot more entertaining. Almost every nation of Europe had its own empire at some point, or at least participated in a few of the Crusades. Even the French! It was also around this time that we stopped raping people after we conquered them; Europe had become politically correct at last.

Back then, money didn't make the world go around; Europeans went around and made the world.

Fast forward to the very end of western civilisation and the only crusaders we have left are a bunch of vulgar, white-trash kiddie-fiddlers, who in any respectable epoch would be impotent soil-dwelling serfs.

I just hope the civilisation that replaces us can deal with these kinds of fools.

When Frank asked if America's revolutionary spirit is gone, I couldn't help thinking that the problem is not that it's gone but that with time it became even worse and more progressive. I was reminded of one of Mencius Moldbug's posts from a while ago which summarized the American revolution from a reactionary point of view. Here are a few choice bits.

And the American Revolution was, in my own personal opinion, more or less, basically, a criminal outrage of the mob - led by leaders who were either unscrupulous, deluded, or both.

. . . the rebels in the American Revolution were motivated by an ideology that was utterly deluded, that amounted to no more than a wacky conspiracy theory. The point is not even slightly arguable. Their interpretation of British politics simply had no basis in reality.

Since this delusional interpretation was the linchpin of their argument for rebellion, and since their reliance on street violence and paramilitary formations is indisputable, they can fairly be classed as unscrupulous or deluded mob leaders - regardless of any classification in the scruples department, a historical task which often verges on the impossible.

. . . In other words, our Founding Fathers were more or less the Troofers of their day. Or, to put it differently, America obtained its independence because of a war that was started by people who were genuinely terrified of the 18th-century equivalent of black helicopters.

. . . Britain was not on a path to a weird, 1984-like future with gold braids and epaulets, crushed under the iron heel of the King, the Church of England and the Lords. Rather, the power of throne and altar and fief in Britain had been dwindling almost monotonically since Mary Tudor - a process which of course has continued to this day.

If you want to understand why he holds this somewhat unpopular opinion, I'm afraid you'll have to read the whole thing which is in Moldbug's consistently long-winded style. If you are wondering what the hell all this is about but can't deal with his writing style, last year I condensed the whole of the Moldbuggian worldview into a single post.

To all our American readers we wish a happy Fourth of July. Hopefully a few of you will get sufficiently drunk at your parties to start spouting anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic rhetoric. Throw in a little secessionism, too. That should be fun.

A week ago I was at a bar with some friends, celebrating a milestone birthday, at a typically trendy yet historic area of Boston. Many of these bars were frequented by the likes of Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. As I was facing my friend, I looked up at the wall above his head and saw a picture of Revolutionary War-era patriots with tricorne hats...drinking, scheming, thinking of ways to not only break away from the tyranny of the British empire but also thinking of ways to convince their fellow working-class Colonial citizens to do the same.

Then I looked around the bar. The band was decent for a bar band but they didn't seem to know any songs past 1996. The women were dressed with glittery dresses, with friends or boyfriends, and the men were baseball cap-wearing zombies with little to offer except their outward appearance - ripped jeans, maybe an ironically trendy label on a shabby t-shirt.

This is a far cry from the brave leaders who saw America for what it could be instead of what it had been. However America turned out, those first hundred years or so saw men who risked their lives to set up a form of government which worked when the elite were allowed to rule and liberties protected to keep the ideas of revolution fresh in the minds of the citizenry (and perhaps to discourage those thoughts at the same time?). I like to think of them as the most famous leaders who saw themselves as mostly replaceable. Whether they felt such a society could last before caving in on itself within a few hundred years, we'll never know.

Today, our Founders are not revered but looked at as hypocrites by the same people that frequent these silly bars without giving a thought to these pictures what they mean, not knowing what hard times truly are, laughed at by illegal immigrant factions who can't believe how easy it is to steal their tax money and how little these Americans know of reality. These same people are the ones who rail on about how the Founders were slave owners and rich land owners. Well, of course they were...did you really think a peasant class alone could have achieved victory? Smart, capable men like General George Washington helped destroy a huge British infantry, not just farmers with pitchforks, despite what Hollywood would have us believe.

Most people can't imagine a life without cell phones, Macintosh computers, or their MySpace page. I find it hard to imagine a country based on the kind of values espoused in The Constitution and Declaration of Independence inhabited primarily by nitwits who can barely read the printed matter on these documents - let alone translate that into solid leadership.

More and more Westerners are waking up to a monocultural nightmare and find themselves searching for their roots. What they discover is that we cannot return to the past, but that we are able to revive traditions in a modern context. If you are neo-Pagan, high on nature, and embrace ancient monuments, here's one way to do it:

Pagans and partygoers drummed, danced or gyrated in hula hoops to stay awake through the night, as more than 35,000 people greeted the summer solstice Sunday at the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge.

"There has been a great atmosphere and where else would you want to be on midsummer's day?" said Peter Carson of English Heritage, the body in charge of Stonehenge.

"It's kind of a pilgrimage," she said. "As a sculptor, I can't help being interested in the stones — they're historic, spiritual — people went to a huge effort to put them here not anywhere else. Why here? And why this configuration? It's fascinating."

I'm unsure how serious some of these people are, looking at the video the reporter made, but at least they've managed to draw a large amount of public attention to an ancient place that bears a wealth of mystical meaning. Maybe we shouldn't try to be hardline traditionalists, but instead try to explain how tradition can be made relevant to modern people and their current lifestyles. Maybe Stonehenge is an ancient crossroad for people to meet and seek unifying purpose in life.

For those of us who not only enjoy old monuments, but also like to take part of old food traditions, the world of alcohol is a fascinating place. These Norwegian beer brewers seem to know what they're talking about:

We at Nøgne Ø are still homebrewers at heart, and as such, proud of our long forgotten traditions. Recently, we did a couple of fun events to promote homebrewing, and to facilitate an arena for meeting and creating networks of homebrewers.

On March 21st, 20 of us met up again, this time with friends and family members, a total of 40. 24 beers were submitted to be assessed by a judging panel. The evening was a great party, with lots of first class high quality beers. Best saison was made by Olav Hodne. Most creative brew was made by Tarjei Sel.

As a commitment to our homebrewing background, we have promised to brew and sell the winner of the Norwegian national homebrewing championship 2009. The winner was announced on March 28th: Andrimne Barley Wine, brewed by Gahr Smith-Gahrsen. We will get back to you with more information on the date for brewing this rich and fruity English style barley wine.

Unfortunately I don't have much experience with Norwegian beer in particular, but knowing from their grogs, which they typically store in sherrybarrels, they seem to have a tendency to appreciate sweeter flavors in contrast to the southern Swedish tradition to which I belong (we prefer raw, organic flavors and less fruitiness). However, no one says no to a well-cooled Nukie Brown Ale on a late evening at a local bar. So tradition is living on, still, despite a globalized world in which we're all trying to fit into an monocultural society. Have a beer and cheer up!

A recent paper quantifying the degree of inbreeding among the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty - quite interesting even if you're not personally into inbreeding - led me to spend some time reading up on insane and retarded rulers. One thing that struck me is how few of these reigns were actually disastrous - it seems that most of the time regents, advisors, queen mothers etc. kept the country running along with the crazy idiot on the throne. It seems that monarchy evolved remarkably robust ways of dealing with utter incompetents who theoretically possess absolute power. Hell, Fyodor I was a generally admired and popular ruler in Russia.

Yet, the disability of Charles II of Spain did cause his country and others enormous problems. He precipitated the War of Spanish Succession not by being a bad ruler but by being really, really lousy in bed.

For 10 years, the couple struggled in vain to beget a child. It seems that, although Carlos attempted intercourse, he suffered from very premature ejaculation, so that he was unable to achieve penetration. Marie Louise confided in the French ambassador, that "she was really not a virgin any longer, but that as far as she could figure things, she believed she would never have children". The French ambassador even managed to get a pair of Carlos' drawers and had them examined by surgeons for traces of sperm, but the doctors could not agree about their findings.

His second wife did no better. So, here is the fatal flaw of monarchy and the major advantage of democracy. Democracy is, as far as I can tell, completely immune to disasters caused by the premature ejaculation problems of its rulers.

Denis Dutton's Arts And Letters Daily is possibly the world's highest-quality list of links. You really can learn something new every day from the things he lists, and from an article about Edgar Allan Poe I learned exactly what killed him:

Poe, drunk and delirious, seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died four days later. He was forty years old.

Now there's something I didn't know - that the man died by the hand of a democratic election. I still haven't gotten over the American and French revolutions and the era of democracy which followed them, but I have to admit that anything which is responsible for killing whiny artists can't be all bad.

I've been thinking lately about what the hell went wrong in the period between the kick in the ass that Mozart got from the Archbishop of Salzburg's servant and Beethoven's funeral. In only a few decades between 1781 and 1827, the composer went from being a skilled servant to a revered priestlike figure believed to be a channel to something beyond mere humanity.

It isn't just that the Archbishop was a mean guy; as Mozart's subsequent financial struggles show, being a very highly regarded composer and musician just wasn't worth very much on the open job market in those days. Whatever happened in those 46 years fundamentally changed not only the perception of the status of music but the amount of money to be made from it. Perhaps it was due to the Enlightenment and the waning influence of religion; perhaps the effects of the Industrial Revolution just meant there was more money spent on entertainment of all kinds.

I know there are many theories, but whatever caused this shift has stayed with us to this day. There's a pretty good amount of money in music. When I was a boy, my grandfather wanted me to take up music because I would always be able to make a living when there was crop failure and famine. Since then the specter of famine has vanished, of course, but demand for music remains reasonably strong even in times of economic downturn.

Status and money - what's there to complain about? Well, I'm not interested in being a pseudo-priest and it gets tiresome when people assume I'm some sensitive artist. I guess that's why playing weddings appeals to me - the money's good and the band are treated as a servants equal to the waiters. I think that mean ol' Archbishop had the right idea - musicians aren't semi-supernatural beings with magical powers, just people with a certain skill. Sometimes I wonder if society can ever go back to a more realistic view of the arts as useful adaptations of a nature essentially identical to spectator sports. I'd like that, as long as it doesn't come with a decrease in my income. I strongly doubt it'll ever happen, though.

To all you sensitive artists out there who find my wish to be seen as merely human deeply offensive, I dedicate this song.

Just how much is rational, enlightened government better than that based on superstition, ignorance and mental illness? It is difficult to find an apples-to-apples comparison, but I have stumbled upon one.

The world has known many mad despots, but perhaps none embodied irrational rule like François Duvalier. "Papa Doc" claimed to be a voodoo priest personally chosen to lead Haiti by Jesus Christ, and as if that wasn't benighted and irrational enough, he later went just plain insane, possibly as a result of brain damage following a heart attack. He became increasingly paranoid. The man's rule was so irrational that some of Haiti's intellectuals fled to Africa.

Perhaps the most rational ruler of all time was José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, known as Dr. Francia or "El Supremo" for short. After taking power of a newly independent Paraguay, he set about designing a government based on the best and most enlightened philiosophy of the time, especailly Rousseau's Social Contract. He was among the best-educated men in the entire country - only one other guy had a doctorate - and an enemy of the superstitious who seized all church possessions. He personally lived humbly, spending only a small part of his personal salary.

Papa Doc's most infamous act of irrationality came in 1963 when he had been informed that Clement Barbot, one of his political opponents, had transformed himself into a black dog. Duvalier ordered all black dogs in Haiti to be killed - an act not only absurdly paranoid and superstitious but also racist (targeting black dogs) and sexist (Barbot being a man would presumably transform into a male dog, yet the execution of bitches was ordered as well). It is difficult to imagine a less rational act of government.

Dr. Francia, on the other hand, being rational, enlightened, philosophical and fair ordered all dogs in all of Paraguay shot. The exact nature of his rational and enlightened reasoning behind that decree is a mystery - perhaps he was a cat person, as many intellectuals are. Regardless of what his righteous reasoning was, however, there's your apples-to-apples comparison.

Most of our readers are from European countries which are former monarchies, and we learn about our royal past in elementary school history classes. This may be different in other countries, but the main thing I still remember from history is STRONG KING GOOD, WEAK KING BAD. A strong monarch who concentrates all authority in his person means times are good for everyone, the land is at peace, and we win wars against foreigners. A weak monarch who lets the nobility have influence or real power is bad because under his rule we get poverty, internal strife, and lost wars. Clearly, the more authority gets diffused among a larger number of people, the worse things get. There was nothing about evil kings or insane kings being bad for the country, by the way; those seem to exist only in fairy tales and in the Old Testament.

Later, monarchy ends and we eventually get around to democracy (either in the regular or people's version) which at least in theory amounts to diffusing authority to all adult citizens of the nation. The history teachers suddenly switch from praising strong central authority to pro-democracy propaganda. Back when I was in school I put that down to socialist propaganda leaving the monarchy era alone, then kicking in once we got to the period of the people's democracy. I assumed that the entire history of the post-monarchy era is massively biased if not full of outright lies, but that the information about the monarchy era was more or less correct. Today the propaganda remains much the same, but I worry that children may be less hostile to it because it is no longer associated with socialism.

To this day I still believe firmly in STRONG KING GOOD, WEAK KING BAD. Someone should inform all those history teachers that they are spreading a very anti-democratic message.

Spectator sports have an ancient tradition, going back at least to "Asterix and the Big Fight", but the form in which we know them today is very much a product of the Industrial Revolution (just like the symphony orchestra). For quite a while, the most popular spectator sport in America, and one of the most popular in England, was rowing. How can a sport pass from dominance to obscure niche status?

From the 1830's for the next half century, no team sport attracted more attention or spectators in America. Rowing received a great boost in 1869, when a Harvard four traveled to England to race Oxford on the Thames. No team sport event had ever received the breadth of publicity accorded this contest, which was won by Oxford in an exciting race. In 1869, there were approximately 90 American boat clubs - two years later, there were about 230 clubs. American rowing popularity was near its apex at the Centennial celebration activities in Philadelphia in 1876. It was one of only three sports included on the agenda, the others being riflery and yachting, and gave rise to fierce international competition on the Schuylkill, involving many of the best amateur oarsmen in the world.

But the professionals, who also raced at the 1876 Centennial, were grabbing a greater share of the limelight. It was primarily individual professional scullers - Americans, Australians, English and Canadians – who dominated the news in the 1880's and 1890's. In England, as the amateurs moved to distance themselves from the non-amateurs, the conflict between the two groups took on the aspect of a class battle. This exacerbated the slide of rowing's hold on public affections. And America, the involvement of gamblers, the accusations of fixed races, poisoned meals and sabotaged boats, and the related scandals associated with professional contests and oarsmen, all combined with the ugly rift between the amateur rowing establishment and the professional rowing community to discredit the professionals in the public eye, and effectively relegated rowing to what would now be perceived as an exclusive and amateur activity to be enjoyed only by college boys and wealthy men.

Rowing had money, marketing (even entire riverside towns had a stake in marketing rowing's success), gambling and passion - all the things that people who don't like sports think are necessary for a sport to succeed. What killed it was, according to rowing historians, accusations or corruption by means ranging from professionalism to poison. What all these things had in common, of course, was that they reduced the dramatic value of what happened on the river, as the real struggle took place beforehand in the form of practice, shadowy sabotage, and race-fixing. The dramatic tale of a race becomes worth far less to us when we know that it is not the tale of the real drama, but only one small and insignificant component of it.

From the perspective of a non-rower - well, not entirely, I paddled on a pontoon once - I think a large part of the decline was the rise of superior competition such as basketball, baseball and football's various offshoots. The length of the games and the division of labor among the team members meant the possibility of much more complex plots, while the field size made possible to see all the action unlike a boat race of several miles. Also, everyone's done some running, jumping, throwing, kicking and swinging sticks so it was easier for regular folk to understand the plot and identify with the actors. Men got sports which are successful at giving them the kind of dramatic tale of team struggle they need in sport, and women got gymnastics and ice skating which give them the kind of drama they are hardwired to seek out.

If sport was all about marketing, we'd be talking about our fantasy rowing teams today. Instead I can tell you that my Premier League fantasy football team just had its best weekend in the two years I've been playing.