The Long Echo: The Plainest Prose

Show Notes

The tenth of November reminds us that history's most sweeping turns rarely pivot on grand declarations; they hinge on ledgers, contractual clauses, and the sudden decision to walk away. From a crusade diverted by an unpaid shipping bill to an empire traded on a single adverb, the grandest ambitions are routinely governed by mundane terms.

What is The Angus Briefing?

Everyone already knows AI can write code. We wanted to know whether it could write anything worth listening to — whether it could hold a room, land a joke, sit properly with a life worth remembering, or read the day's news without sounding like a press release. So we stopped handing it problems and started handing it a microphone. What came back is this network: ten public programs, a full bench of hosts and correspondents, an anchor desk, a pub table, a Sunday service, and a Saturday-night variety hour broadcast from a town that doesn't exist. Every word of it was written by AI. We only pressed record.

Alice Pemberton: In nineteen ten, Thomas A. Davis founds the Army and Navy Academy in California, creating a military school that lasts more than a century. Alice Pemberton: In fourteen forty-four, King Władysław the Third of Poland and Hungary rides on crusade against Sultan Murad the Second at Varna, and dies on the field. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen sixty-seven, Australia's Parliament votes Nauru its independence. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the tenth of November. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on a crusade that couldn't pay its boat bill; Arthur Nightingale on a poet who quit at twenty; Margaux Delacroix on a children's show beside the garbage cans; Judge Marion Calloway on a colony lost to one word; and, at the table, a diamond in the post. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: In twelve-oh-two, a crusader army sworn to Jerusalem laid siege to a Catholic city instead, because it couldn't pay its shipping bill. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: That bill is the whole story. The Fourth Crusade ordered a fleet from Venice for an army that never fully arrived, and the men who did couldn't pay. So the Doge, Enrico Dandolo, named his price: help Venice take back the rebellious city of Zara, on the Adriatic. Alice Pemberton: A Christian city. Professor Edmund Cavendish: Catholic, under a Hungarian king who had himself taken the cross. The crusade's marshal, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, saw Zara from the ships and wrote: 'vainly would you have sought for a fairer city, or one of greater strength, or richer.' His comrades asked, 'How could such a city be taken by force, save by the help of God himself?' Alice Pemberton: And the Pope had forbidden it. Professor Edmund Cavendish: Innocent the Third had. They broke the harbour chain anyway, and within a fortnight Zara was split between Venetians and crusaders and sacked. The Pope excommunicated the army. Simon de Montfort walked out of the crusade altogether. Alice Pemberton: Where did the rest go? Professor Edmund Cavendish: To Constantinople, which they plundered within eighteen months, hardening the split between Eastern and Western Christianity. Barely a handful ever reached the Holy Land. Zara is where a holy war learned it could be paid for with somebody else's city. Alice Pemberton: In eighteen ninety-one, a one-legged arms trader died in a Marseille hospital, and France lost the boy who had remade its poetry, then walked away from it. Our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: Walked away is exactly it. Arthur Rimbaud grew up in Charleville with a soldier father who lived at home for less than three months of the marriage, and a mother he privately called the 'Mouth of Darkness.' Alice Pemberton: And he ran. Arthur Nightingale: To Paris, as a teenager, in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War. In a few furious years Rimbaud wrote nearly everything we have, poems that prefigured surrealism before it had a name, and lived a hectic, sometimes violent affair with the poet Paul Verlaine. Out of that came A Season in Hell, a doorway to modernist literature. Alice Pemberton: And then? Arthur Nightingale: At twenty, having gathered Illuminations, he stopped. He never wrote literature again. Rimbaud became a merchant on three continents, and finally a trader in Harar, in Abyssinia, now and then dealing in guns. Alice Pemberton: What brought him back to France? Arthur Nightingale: His right leg. He wrote to his mother of 'varicose veins in my right leg that make me suffer a great deal.' It was bone cancer. Sixteen men carried him on a litter to the coast at Zeila. It took the better part of a fortnight. Alice Pemberton: And Marseille. Arthur Nightingale: The Hôpital de la Conception. Rimbaud wired home: 'Lundi matin, on ampute ma jambe. Danger mort.' Monday morning, they cut off my leg. Danger of death. He died there that November. The man who taught modern poetry to break every rule ended in the plainest prose there is: Danger mort. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen sixty-nine, American public television premiered a children's show set on a city street, graffiti on the walls, garbage cans by the stoop. Our arts and culture critic, Margaux Delacroix. Margaux? Margaux Delacroix: Those garbage cans were the masterstroke. Sesame Street didn't build a nursery. It built a New York brownstone stoop and invited small children to come and sit on it. Alice Pemberton: Whose idea? Margaux Delacroix: A television producer, Joan Ganz Cooney, and a Carnegie Foundation psychologist, Lloyd Morrisett. Their aim is a sentence I adore: to 'master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them.' Sesame Street was the first children's show built on a curriculum, and the first whose effects anyone formally studied. Alice Pemberton: What did that first episode look like? Margaux Delacroix: Gordon walks a little girl called Sally onto the set: 'You've never seen a street like Sesame Street.' Then Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, and Carol Burnett dropping by. Alice Pemberton: And was it any good? Margaux Delacroix: The critic Les Brown said it answered the old charge that television 'takes a viewer's time without giving anything in return.' My proof is smaller. In that first episode, Kermit the Frog delivers a solemn lecture on the letter W, and Cookie Monster interrupts it. Nobody has filmed a truer classroom since. Alice Pemberton: In sixteen seventy-four, the Dutch handed New Netherland to England, and the peace treaty that did it turned on one sweeping word. Our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Judge? Judge Marion Calloway: The word is 'whatsoever.' The Treaty of Westminster, ending the Third Anglo-Dutch War, ordered that 'whatsoever countries, islands, towns, ports, castles, or forts have or shall be taken on both sides, since the time the late unhappy war broke out,' be 'restored to the former lord or proprietor.' Alice Pemberton: Why was New Netherland England's to get back? Judge Marion Calloway: Because England held it before that war, and the Dutch had only recaptured it the year before the peace. Lawyers call that clause status quo ante, and it is merciless about the clock. Everything taken after the starting gun goes home. Alice Pemberton: So the Dutch won it fighting and lost it signing. Judge Marion Calloway: England's Parliament had lost its nerve first. Charles the Second went to war on secret French money, and when Parliament stopped paying, he needed peace. Alice Pemberton: Who came out ahead? Judge Marion Calloway: Read the clause once more. Suriname, taken by the Dutch in an earlier war, fell before the clock started, so it stayed Dutch. And New Netherland, the colony that became New York, was settled not by a battle but by a single word: whatsoever. Alice Pemberton: At the table: our Southern firecracker, Birdie Maddox; our book editor and essayist, Calvin Alden; and our diplomacy hand, former ambassador Eleanor Shaw. Calvin, you've brought exploration's most famous greeting. Calvin Alden: And it wasn't the first one. In eighteen seventy-one, at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, Henry Morton Stanley found David Livingstone. But in Stanley's own book, a man steps from the crowd first: 'Good morning, sir!' … 'I am Susi, the servant of Dr. Livingstone.' Birdie Maddox: And Stanley says, 'Who the mischief are you?' Honey, that beats 'I presume.' Eleanor Shaw: Every great meeting has a Susi who arranged it and never made the headline. Alice Pemberton: Eleanor, eighteen ninety-eight. Eleanor Shaw: Wilmington, North Carolina. Armed white men under Alfred Moore Waddell burned the Black-owned Daily Record, shot Black residents and forced out the elected officials, the only municipal government ever overthrown in American history. A Black woman wrote to President McKinley that they marched 'when our Negro men had gone to their places of work.' Calvin Alden: And she still had to write it without her name. Birdie Maddox: Let me lift us. Nineteen fifty-one: Mayor Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey, dials the first customer-dialed coast-to-coast call. He reaches the mayor of Alameda, California, and asks, 'Hello. How's the weather out there?' Frank Osborne: 'Fine. But how are the mosquitoes in New Jersey.' Calvin Alden: Across a continent by rotary dial, and they talk about bugs. That's the telephone in one sentence. Alice Pemberton: Calvin, nineteen seventy-five. Calvin Alden: The Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest ship ever lost on the Great Lakes, went down in a Lake Superior storm with all twenty-nine men. Captain Ernest McSorley's last message: 'We are holding our own.' Eleanor Shaw: No distress call. No bodies recovered. Investigators blamed the hatches, and the exact cause is still unknown. Alice Pemberton: Birdie, something shiny. Birdie Maddox: Nineteen fifty-eight: Harry Winston gives the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian, by U.S. mail, registered first class, in a plain brown package. Postage: two dollars forty-four. Said Winston: 'It's the safest way to mail gems.' Eleanor Shaw: And he skipped the ceremony. His insurance wouldn't let him be photographed with it. Alice Pemberton: A servant's greeting, a captain's last words, a diamond in brown paper. History keeps its best things in plain wrappers. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the tenth of November — where in nineteen seventy-five Portugal withdrew its last colonial personnel from Luanda as the MPLA decisively beat the FNLA at Quifangondo, an empire leaving and a civil war arriving on one day; where in seventeen seventy-five the United States Marine Corps was founded at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia; and, more recently, where in two thousand and two a tornado outbreak ran from northern Ohio to the Gulf Coast, among the largest November has recorded. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: in seventeen ninety-three, revolutionary Paris turned Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason and carried a living woman to the Convention as the Goddess of Reason. Oak garlands, liberty bonnet, blue mantle, leaning on a pike. Mortimer Finch: They abolished God and replaced Him with a lady in a chair. Bold. Did it last? Humphrey Thwaite: Barely a year. Robespierre swapped in his own Supreme Being. Mortimer Finch: Ah. A reorganisation at the top. Some things never change.