Two Visions of America

[murstein]

When American politics has been riven by partisan wrangling, the driver has always been between two visions of America. This was true when Washington's cabinet was split by arguments between Alexander Hamilton's Big Business agenda and Thomas Jefferson's Small Farmer agenda, and it's true today

Comments

[murstein]

True.

On the other hand, when he realized his mistake, he offered shild: ". . . pay whatever it would take . . ." When he offered it, they refused to come out. He offered it again, when they came out to put out the small portion of the fire that jumped the property line.

This is not frithful; a frithful response would be to allow him to make the year's payment when he first called. This is not even grithful; a grithful response would have been to make him pay a punitive amount for immediate coverage. 20 years' worth of annual fees, or more than that, would be the immediate example. As Jonah Goldberg put it in the link above:

Why isn’t there a happy middle ground? You can pay 75 bucks upfront or, if you wait until your house is on fire, it will cost you, I dunno, $10,000? Lots of things work like this.

By refusing even grith, the fire department is in effect saying that the Cranicks are as much utengarth as it seems Chancellor Merkel considers the Germans slain by a Predator drone in Pakistan on Monday.

Were this saga-era Iceland, one would understand the Cranicks have more reason for feud than Bergþóra did at the beginning of Njal's saga.

Was the fire department within their rights? Certainly. Most pointless bloodfeuds grow from a kernel of action that is legal-but-ungrithful. Not that I'm predicting blood feud here; modern America is too civilized for that. We tend to respond in different ways; the Progressive Movement of the turn of the last century is one example.

[laureth]

OTOH, if they took his payment, it would pretty much set a precedent for "people don't have to really pay anything, but can just pony up the year's fee when they call in a fire." It's like paying your insurance premium up only when you go to the hospital for an operation. It's the ongoing protection payments (even when not needed) that fund it, more than any one-time payment.

This does not mean I agree with the system. Ohhhh no, I do not. But the way it was executed there, suckity suck as it was, seems legit by its own rules.

[jaiser]

While I agree that it was 100% within the law, in this case the law is ridiculous. So now, instead of taking "whatever it takes", the town's/state's social services system will have to help pay to house this family because they lost everything. This seems most illogical, if the original plan was to save the local government money.

When Medicare will pay for some 80 year old dude to have boner pills or a penis pump (yes, it's true!), I find it unacceptable to let someone's home burn down over $75.00.

IMHO, this is a slippery slope. What's next? If you don't pay your $5,000/year police "protection money", we won't respond to your 911 calls and you'll be robbed/raped/murdered? Somewhere, a line drawn must be.

[murstein]

I used those terms because I have reason to expect freydis would understand them, just as I'd expect you to catch offhand references to Gregor Vorbarra or Manticore. And, when one's thoughts on honor are tied to words that passed out of common use long ago, it sometimes helps to use them.

Shild is a lot like the judgment in a court case: Part recompense, but mostly fine. Although no court was necessary when the one who would pay was offering it.

Frith is the condition of a society working well together. It's often mistranslated as peace. This is a misnomer, because some societies involve what most Americans would call a lot of violent conflict to maintain frith. For example, consider Iceland, which had a legislature and court, but counted on court-approved blood-feuds for the enforcement mechanism.

Grith is . . . not quite frith, but close, extended to those who aren't "your people," often in limited locations and/or periods of time.

Innengarth (not used, I know), is "your people," more or less. Some only counted their immediate household (which, on some larger farms, might be upwards of a hundred people) as innengarth. Some counted it everyone who lived close enough to attend the local thing, and the more accepting counted it more-or-less the way we do nationality today. When the conversion to Christianity blew through, priests encouraged everyone to consider all Christians innengarth.

Utengarth is everyone who's not innengarth. I just thought it was easier to define it this way.

Bergþóra was one of two feuding wives in Njal's saga. To compact the tale incredibly, two best friends marry women who hate each other. The women proceed to feud (against their husbands' best efforts), using proxies, to the extent that both families are exterminated. You might think of the Hatfields and McCoys as a simpler, and almost Disneyfied, version of the same theme.