Trials and tribulations

A friend of mine posted a link on social media about how forty percent of Republicans approve of how Donald Trump has handled the whole horrible mess surrounding the incriminating written records from convicted pedophiles Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, despite the fact that the way he's handled it is (1) denying the records exist, (2) saying that the records don't include him, (3) saying that Obama created the records to slander him, and (4) saying okay, but Bill Clinton is in there, too, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Apparently, a significant proportion of MAGA-inclined individuals think this is all just hunky-dory, and are capable of believing all four of these things simultaneously.

My friend appended a comment to the effect that the whole world has gone crazy.  And I certainly understand how he could reach that conclusion.  But still, I think he's got it wrong.

The world hasn't gone crazy.  The world is crazy.  The world has always been crazy.  It's just that because there are now eight billion people on the planet and a lot of us are electronically connected, the craziness is amplified more, and spreads faster, than before.

But people?  People have always been loony, or at least a great many of them.  And here's another thing; that saying about "the cream always rises to the top" is patent nonsense.  Yeah, the situation right now is pretty extreme, but a lot of our previous presidents were nothing to brag about.  I mean, Nixon?  George W. Bush?  Reagan?  I think writer Dave Barry hit closer to the mark: "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that person is crazy."

But if you still think today's leaders (and the ones who support them) are any nuttier than those in the past, allow me to introduce you to Pope Stephen VI.

Stephen was pope for only a little over a year, from May 896 to August 897.  He started out as a priest in Rome, but other than that we know little about his background.  Apparently in 892 he was appointed as bishop of Anangni "against his will" by the pope at the time, one Formosus.

Formosus died on April 11, 896, and was succeeded by Pope Boniface VI, who reigned for fifteen days.  (Amazingly, he's not the pope with the shortest reign; that dubious honor goes to Urban VII, who died of malaria twelve days after getting the nod from the College of Cardinals.)  Boniface supposedly died of gout, but given that the church historian Caesar Baronius called him a "disgusting monster guilty of adultery and homicide," it's possible he was given a little help in shuffling off this mortal coil.

Anyhow, the next guy to be elected was the reluctant bishop Stephen.  And this is when things really went off the rails.

Formosus had gotten himself involved in playing politics with the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire quipped, was "neither Roman nor holy."  The current emperor was Lambert of Spoleto, whom Formosus himself had crowned, but in 893 the pope was becoming a little twitchy about how aggressive the Spoleto faction was getting, and decided to invite Arnulf of Carinthia, Lambert's rival, to Rome.

Formosus crowned him emperor too.

This would probably have devolved into a bloodbath had both Arnulf and Formosus not conveniently died within months of each other in 896.  Whew, disaster averted, right?  All settled, right?

Wrong.

Lambert of Spoleto and his redoubtable mother, Ageltrude, came to Rome, stomped into the papal residence, and said to the pope -- at this point Stephen VI -- "what the fuck, dude, I thought we had an agreement?"  Stephen babbled something to the effect that it hadn't been him who'd double-crossed Lambert, it'd been that rat Formosus, and what the hell do you want me to do about it anyway, he's already dead?

Dead-shmead, doesn't matter, Lambert said, and demanded that Stephen make amends.

So he did.

He dug up Formosus's rotting corpse and put it on trial.

Le Pape Formose et Etienne VI, by Jean-Paul Laurens (1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- that Formosus couldn't exactly speak on his own behalf.  As James Randi put it, "It's easy to talk to the dead; the difficulty is in getting them to talk back."  So Stephen appointed a deacon to be the voice of Formosus's defense.

I'm sure you can predict how effective a strategy that was.

At one point, Stephen demanded of the corpse, "When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?", and the deacon didn't have a good answer.  In fact, since the deacon was one of Stephen's friends, he deliberately didn't have a good answer for anything.  In the end (surprise!) Formosus was found guilty, stripped of his papal vestments, had three fingers of his right hand (the ones used in papal blessings) cut off, and was interred in a graveyard for the poor.  Then Stephen decided this wasn't sufficient, so he dug up the corpse again, tied stones to it, and threw it into the Tiber River.  All of Formosus's official acts were revoked and invalidated.

This, unfortunately, included Stephen's appointment as bishop of Anangni, but it took everyone a while to realize that.

Even this wasn't the end of it, though.  Despite being weighted down, the corpse washed up on the shores of the river, and people started claiming that touching it had worked miracles.  Cured the ill, made the lame walk, that sort of thing.  Maybe Formosus had been a holy man after all!  The public sentiment turned against Stephen, and he was deposed and arrested -- and one of the charges was that he'd become pope after telling everyone he was a bishop when he actually wasn't.  Given how widely he was hated, no one came up with the objection, "But... wasn't he the one who made the declaration that invalidated his own appointment as bishop?"  Didn't matter, as it turned out.  Stephen was strangled in prison in August of 897, after a reign of only fourteen months.  As for Formosus, his body was reclothed in the papal vestments and was reburied in St. Peter's Basilica, where he's remained ever since.  The next pope, Theodore II, only reigned for twenty days (cause of death unknown but highly suspicious), so he didn't have time to do much other than say "You know, I always thought Formosus was actually an okay guy," but the one after that, John IX (who reigned for a whole two years, which was pretty good for the time) rehabilitated Formosus completely, reinstated all of his official acts, excommunicated seven cardinals who'd gone along with the "Cadaver Synod," as it became known, and announced a prohibition against putting any more corpses on trial.

Which you'd think would be one of those things you wouldn't have to pass a law about.

So there's some prime grade-A craziness that shows our current lunacy is nothing new.  I've heard it seriously claimed that the Earth is the mental ward of the universe; no less a luminary than George Bernard Shaw said, "The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum."  I doubt Shaw was completely serious, but you know, I think he had a point.  And it's cold comfort to realize that the kind of insanity we're living through now has been going on for a very long time, given that at the moment we're stuck in the middle of it.

Humans seem to be capable of some serious nuttiness, and it all gets amplified a thousandfold when the nuts end up in charge.  But it bears keeping in mind that the nuts wouldn't end up in charge if it weren't for the support of lots of ordinary people, so we can't so easily absolve ourselves of the blame.

But "at least Donald Trump hasn't dug up a dead guy and put him on trial" is kind of a weak reassurance.  Especially since you can always follow that up with a powerful little word:

"... yet."

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The code breakers

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.

I've read a bit about the work British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing did during World War II regarding breaking the "unbreakable" Enigma code used by the Germans -- a code that relied on a machine whose settings were changed daily.  And while I can follow a description of how Turing and his colleagues did what they did, I can't in my wildest dreams imagine I could do anything like that myself.

I had the same sense of awe when I read Margalit Fox's fantastic book The Riddle of the Labyrinth, which was about the work of linguists Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in successfully translating the Linear B script of Crete -- a writing system for which not only did they not initially know what the symbol-to-sound correspondence was, they didn't know if the symbols represented single sounds, syllables, or entire words -- nor what language the script represented!  (Turned out it was Mycenaean Greek.)

I don't know about you, but I'm nowhere near smart enough to do something like that.

Despite my sense that such endeavors are way outside of my wheelhouse, I've always been fascinated by people who do undertake such tasks.  Which is why I was so interested in a link a friend of mine sent me about the breaking of a code that had stumped cryptographers for centuries -- the one used by King Charles V of Spain back in the sixteenth century.

Charles was a bit paranoid, so his creation of a hitherto unbreakable code is definitely in character.  When the letter was written, in 1547, he was in a weak position -- he'd signed the Treaty of Crépy tentatively ending aggression with the French, but his ally King Henry VIII of England had just died and was succeeded by his son, the sickly King Edward VI.  Charles felt vulnerable...

... and in fact, when the letter was finally decrypted, it was found that it was about his fears of an assassination plot.

As it turned out, the fears were unfounded, and he went on to rule Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for another eleven years, finally dying of malaria at age 58.

His code remained unbroken until recently, however.  But the team of Cécile Pierrot-Inria and Camille Desenclos finally was able to decipher it, thanks to a lucky find -- another letter between Charles and his ambassador to France, Jean de St. Mauris, which had a partial key scribbled in the margin.  That hint included the vital information that nine of the symbols were meaningless, only thrown in to make it more difficult to break.  (Which worked.)

Even with the partial solution in hand, it was still a massive task.  As you can see from their solution, most of the consonants can be represented by two different symbols, and double letters are represented by yet another different (single) symbol.  There are single symbols that stand for specific people. 

But even with those difficulties, Pierrot-Inria and Desenclos managed to break the code.

All of this gives hope to linguists and cryptographers working on the remaining (long) list of writing systems that haven't been deciphered yet.  (Wikipedia has a list of scripts that are still not translated -- take a look, you'll be amazed at how many there are.)  I'm glad there are people still working on these puzzles.  Even if I don't have the brainpower to contribute to the effort, I'm in awe that there are researchers who are allowing us to read writing systems that before were a closed book.

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