Then the dog is related to both of us!

Three juxtapositions that bring home how remote and isolated we have become to horrendous circumstances so recently with us.

First up was an item in The Life Millennium, a compilation of 100 most important events and people of the past 1,000 years, published by Life Books in 1998. The 79th most important event was:

The Rise of the Welfare State. Before England adopted a formal antipoverty program, the destitute relied on begging, thievery and the Catholic Church's ample coffers for survival. But by the late 16th century, the Church, stripped of its holdings by Henry VIII, was no longer in a position to help. The rising demand for wool, then England's leading export, further inflated poverty rolls as greedy landlords forced tenants off their property in favor of more profitable sheep. It was left to the government to lend a hand. As codified in the Poor Law of 1601, though, it was not to be a handout. In exchange for financial assistance, the able bodied were obligated to labor in workhouses. Children were assigned to apprenticeships. Even the sick and infirm, in poorhouses, had to do piecework. Those who did not work were whipped, imprisoned and, in some cases, put to death. The meager earnings these institutional safety nets provided were not enough to pull people out of despair. But the premise behind the law - that a government has a responsibility to its poor - and the resulting public policies affected the future of social welfare.

That was a couple of evenings ago.

Then yesterday, in moving stuff around my library, I surfaced, peeked in to, and then had to read, The Echoing Green: Memories of Victorian Youth by Gillian Avery. Fascinating excerpts from memoirs, biographies and letters from those living through the 1800s when fears of a Napoleonic invasion were not only widespread but well founded, when the poorhouses were still part of the psychological landscape of the poor but also the near poor and even the fledgling middle class. When highway robbers were still hung from gibbets for public reflection. When Roman Catholics in Ireland could still be transported for practicing their religion. When the Chartists and other organizations threatened the established order with riots and violent confrontations. When not just hunger, but starvation was a familiar condition for large parts of the population. We have banished all this from our memory. My living mother knew her grandmother who was in turn born in 1854. So this is not just ancient history, but should we wish, it is close to living memory. Granted conditions were broadly much better in America than in Britain, and far better than on the continent - but that tends to go to show just how much perspective we have lost.

Charles Shaw was a child in the Hungry 1840s and recalled a riot in the Pottery towns. A confrontation occurred in a town square between a magistrate backed by a troop of soldiers and the protesting Chartists.

The panic, the chaos and the injuries in that square packed with people were long remembered in the Potteries. Charles himself did not see the soldiers charge, but he heard the rattle of muskets, and ran from the field where he was playing. He met the wounded people streaming out of the town, as if they were pursued by wild beasts. There was a cobbler whom he knew, with the crown cut off his hat, and the bridge of his nose slit in two, telling the people round him how the soldiers had tried to cut off his head. Charles pressed on to the market place. Here the soldiers were trying to drive the sullen, slow-moving crowds away, but streams of people were pouring in. When the cavalry began to clear the narrow streets the confusion, groans and shrieks were terrible, so was the agony of fear on the faces of the men and women.

It is humbling to read the quotidian suffering, taken in stride as the memoirists pursued actions towards a better life, all entailing hard work, big chances, and pursuit of education.

Then today, again, clearing some stacks of books, I just had to glance into Henry D. Spalding's Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor.

In the millennium book, the past agonies are ameliorated by the continuous improvements in life such as the beginnings of welfare, meager as they might have been. In the Victorian tales, there is inspiration from the effortful lives lived that reached into the beginnings of the modern age of plenty.

And with Spalding, there is the use of humor to deflect or leaven otherwise dangerous and miserable circumstances. Two jokes have to suffice of these much more recent tragedies.

A policeman, a staunch Nazi, swaggered down the street with a gigantic St. Bernard on a leash.

"That's a fine dog you have there," said a Jewish passerby. "What breed is it?"

"He's a cross between a mongrel and a Jew," spat the policeman.

"Aha!" retorted the nimble-witted Jew. "Then the dog is related to both of us!"

and

A Jew was walking on a street in Berlin when he accidentally brushed against a black-shirted storm trooper.

"Swine!" roared the Nazi.

"Epstein," said the Jew, bowing.