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A Little Place in the Country

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Many thanks to Steve for two guest blogs last week. We’re in a guest blog free-fire zone. No need to ask – just send one whenever you have an idea! connelly.dale@gmail.com

On this day in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for the Island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic, his second exile. They had already tried to put him on ice at Elba, but he didn’t stay.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I really don’t know anything about Napoleon, except that led the French when they were successful at war, that he was short, he liked to tuck a hand into his vest, and he married Josephine.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nutmegdesigns/

Oh, and he has a lovely pastry named for him. Although this one wants to be called Alice. And why not? Alice is a friendly name, and being served a dessert named Alice is not an instant reminder that you are a zero when it comes to French History.

It is pitiful to be so clueless and I would blame the American education system except that I have been out of it a long time. Several of my beloved teachers are long dead and at any rate they can’t be held responsible for my ignorance anymore. I have had plenty of opportunities to complete my education, but decided to watch TV instead.

So no historical facts or meaningful observations come to mind when I think of Napoleon’s final exile, but I have been able to come up with two songs.

This one by Mary Black is very specifically about St. Helena.

And this one, named for the battle that sent Napoleon into his final exile.

If I had appeared on television in any of those outfits, I would want to go away for a while too. But the thought of total exile seems quaint today. Where is exile, exactly? And what is it? Can our compulsively interconnected world even imagine it?

And is there a place on the globe where they haven’t heard of Abba? Anywhere?

You are responsible for punishing a military mastermind so threatening he can’t be allowed to raise another army. Prison would be a dangerous place – too many impressionable minds waiting for a leader. And dropping him on a barren island somewhere? That’s just a reality show waiting to happen. His influence would grow!

Construct some sort of exile to keep him in check.

60 thoughts on “A Little Place in the Country”

  1. Good morning to all,

    If Napoleon is so dangerous that we can’t keep him in a normal prison, I don’t know what to do with him. Some prisoners are kept in isolation cells, but I don’t think any prisoner should be kept that way. Maybe he should just get a lot of therapy. Do you think some good therapists could cure him of his need to conquer the world? Billy Marty could go to work on him. Making him have therapy sessions with Billy Marty might be sort of like putting him in exile. I’m assuming we are talking about what we do with Napoleon if he existed in our world.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I’m at a loss for this one. When my son was little exile consisted of sitting in the corner for a timeout. While getting him to accept this containment was quite a chore, he eventually did learn this, so a more complete exile was not necessary. My thought process about this has never wandered further.

    I did fly around the top of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming with my brother-in-law, the pilot, once. The top of that might have possibilities for exile, especially if one is height phobic. However, I did glimpse some pop cans up there, glinting in the sun. So somebody else has been there before the criminal.

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  4. I’d put him in charge the kitchen at the Head Start center in my town. He’d have to use his wiles to plan daily meals for 3-5 year olds. He always was concerned about the food his troops had, saying the an army marched on its stomach.I think he would rise to the challenge at a preschool.

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    1. Good idea, Renee. Kind of a work release program. If anyone could keep Napoleon in line, I think a bunch of 3 to 5 year olds could do it.

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      1. I can hear it now. “What! They don’t like their pain perdu cut into triangles? What do you mean they don’t eat artichokes? What is “Fruit cup”? This is the finest vin rouge. What do you mean they drink milk? They will love my bouillabaisse. Away with these sticks of fish!”

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  5. i think a desert island ala tom hanks in shipwrecked would do it. no electricity , no access to the word. maybe leave a match and a basketball. that should be a pretty good exile. camping skills not too good. shucks, figure it out thats the bummer about exile. no one to listen to your rantng and raving and whining. hey napolian, do you think you would prefer lizard, fish or monkey meat if you could catch one? good time to think vegan.
    dale i think you look a little like the guitar player in the abba video. did your hair pooff like that on top when you had hair?

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    1. Me, too. Also, I am looking at a date for a Carol Burnett Marathon. Sunday October 9 is past garden season. Let me know if that works for anyone.

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    3. Re: Guthrie outing Wednesday evening. There’s a $3.00 surcharge per ticket for phone orders. If I can get a firm commitment of number of people going, I’m willing to drive to the Guthrie tomorrow to purchase tickets and avoid that ridiculous fee, but I’d like a firm commitment soon. You can pay me on Wednesday. Please email me if you’re in.

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  7. Greetings! There aren’t too many places on earth one could be in total exile. Maybe in the middle of the desert in Nevada or New Mexico where absolutely no internet, cell phone, radio or TV frequencies can be found.

    We went to see the movie “Cowboys & Aliens” yesterday — pretty fun movie. An interesting mix of genres. It’s a Western with cowboys and Indians, with the addition of some supremely ugly, bad-ass aliens who want our gold. It’s set in the middle of the desert, somewhere with all the interesting rock formations and canyons, which is where the aliens hide. Then they come out to terrorize humans, shooting and lassoing them behind their ships so they can be captured for study. Then Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig and others go after them to get their people back. Good guys, bad guys and Indians all working together to take down the aliens with just guns, arrows, dynamite and ropes. You gotta love it …

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  8. Ikea-Since Napoleon was a military strategist during a time when forces marched in straight lines he likely lacks the tactical skills for escaping from the middle of Ikea.

    My on-call pager once went off when I was mid-Ikea and even with my modern tactical capabilities it was hard to escape.

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  9. I heard a story a couple weeks ago about folks who have made a job/career out of waiting in lines in China – lines to sign your kid up for school (people camp in these lines as I understand), lines to get a prescription (that one requires multiple lines as I recall – one for the prescription written, one to get the pills, and one to pay), lines for probably darn near everything. Make Napoleon be a line sitter in modern day China. Waiting all day in a sea of people. But he can’t do anything to muster troops or rearrange the lines, as that would upset the balance of the lines and the order of the people in them. He must stand or sit and wait in his designated line.

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    2. my experience is that the chibnese are the best waiters ibn the world. ask them to sit and wait for three hours and they will think nothing of it. no problem. ask them to get in a line and there is huge issue. they don’t get the line concept. there is minnesota nice and then there is china push to get in fornt of you. you have to laugh at the little old ladies who are 4 feert tall weigh 80 pounds and are masters at elbowing their way in fornt of the next guy when there is an opening.

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  10. Dale,
    Your post inspired me to do research well, not real research just a trip to Wikipedia. In France they do not call this delicious pastry Napoleon, but rather refer to it as mille-feuilles. The Cliffie in me always wondered why there was a discrepancy so…
    From the big W
    According to La Varenne, it was earlier called gâteau de mille-feuilles (English: cake of a thousand leaves), referring to the many layers of pastry. Using traditional puff pastry, made with six folds of three layers, it has 729 layers; with some modern recipes it may have as many as 2,048.[2]

    The variant name of Napoleon appears to come from napolitain, the French adjective for the Italian city of Naples, but altered by association with the name of Emperor Napoleon I of France. The Larousse Gastronomique does not mention the Napoléon, although a gateau napolitain is listed, with a note that while the cake itself is not often seen, small biscuits known as fonds napolitains are still made, decorated with butter cream or conserves.[3] There is no evidence to connect the pastry to the emperor himself. In France, a Napoléon is a mille-feuille filled with almond flavoured paste

    It is a good thing that the name Alice is available to fill this naming void!

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      1. Thanks for asking. It is a roaring success and I wish we had dug up all the front lawn instead of 2/3rds of it. I am pretty tired today as we spent most of the weekend weeding and harvesting peas, eggplants, and raspberries and then putting them up for the winter or finding recipes to use them now. Our yard looks pretty cool, I think. The Blue Lake pole beans are a 6 feet tall, the tomatoes are well over the tops of their cages, and the cannelini beans and Yellow Indian Woman beans are filling out nicely. The butternut squash is forming nicely and the okra and hot peppers are 2 feet tall and forming pods. As usual, we hope for a late frost.

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      2. Sounds wonderful, Renee. Are you getting any hassles from neighbors or city hall for planting your front yard with crops instead of grass? I guess it depends on where you live. A woman in Oak Park, MI, had her front yard dug up for sewer lines or something. She then planted the whole front yard with beautiful crops — raised beds w/bark mulch paths — very nicely kept up. Someone complained and she almost went to jail for not planting her front yard with “suitable plant materials” as city planner had insisted. Luckily, media sources and Natural News made such a ruckus over their ridiculous rules, they dropped charges against her. Farm on my friends …

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      3. I am happy to report that it seems to be acceptable to everyone concerned. The city forester was at our house the other day assessing a couple of spruce trees and said he wished everybody would plant gardens in their front yard. Even our fussy, terrier-hating neighbors to the south have taken a keen interest in the progress of our plants.

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  12. Morning–
    Back at ‘work-work’ today. Can’t you tell?

    I don’t think there are any isolated places anymore that you could impose exile.
    This is rather morbid but even on our farm and pastures and ‘back forties’ so to speak, with the deer and turkey hunters and such wandering though I don’t know how you could ever dispose of a body and not have it be found. Not that I’m up to any such thing… it’s just what I think about while plowing. You hear on the news ‘Hunters found human remains in a secluded area…’.

    I do like the IKEA suggestions!

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      1. Classes start here on the 22nd.

        My son moves into his dorm at North Park University in Chicago on the 24th. Stand by for wailing and tears and gnashing of teeth.

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      2. A comment for you. My daughter says the worst day of her life was the day we took her older brother, her best friend for most of her childhood, off to college. She was home alone, 16 years old and very independent. We never thought to think that she would react as she did, which she only told us about a few years later. So, I assume you would think about how his leaving will impact your daughter, but just in case . . .

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      5. MN in S–

        I wondered who would catch that. 🙂
        Probably a little from all of us! Hah!
        Clyde, we have talked about how our daughter will handle this. I think she’ll be OK but thanks for checking.

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  13. No need to construct an exile, just take advantage of the one he constructs for himself. And keep him out of trouble/do something constructive at the same time. Napoleon was fascinated by Egyptology. The illustrated multi-volume books he commissioned are still standards of what the Egyptian monuments looked like when he got there. He LOVED ancient Egypt. Get him a job in the National Museum in Cairo. They’re still trying to analyze stuff that people found back in the 1950’s. Too much stuff, not enough people/resources to get through it all. More than enough for his lifetime, even today. And he’d love it.

    As for Alice, all I can say is, “…arithmetic-arithmetock…”

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  14. I think Jim’s idea about Cap’n Billy works. The crew would just have to be diligent and keep track of him when in port. And no fun stuff – no drinking grog, singing sea shantys, with the other crew. Do they have jail cells onboard? And if he misbehaves, counseling with BMB.

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    1. I guess I’m out of the loop, but I’m not quite getting the IKEA joke. I looked it up and apparently it’s a store with organization and storage ideas/items. Please enlighten me on how this fits in with exile!?

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      1. its kind of the store from hell
        i went into house on the rock and once in line you just hang in there for 4 hours til you get to the end of the line. same thing at ikea. you go in and have to walk by everything else on the way to the escape hatch at the far end

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      2. I believe it’s because once you enter the standard layout of an IKEA store — which is a meandering path through two floors of home org and funishings — there is no short way out.

        I arrived in Minnesota with only three suitcases to my name, and after lots of practice did eventually develop a quick escape from the MSP IKEA.

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  16. Since the challenge is to “keep him in check,” the issue of where Napolean is incarcerated is less important than the conditions. It isn’t hard to lock someone up, Harry Houdini notwithstanding. What you want to do is keep Napolean “in check” politically. And if you are careful, that shouldn’t be so hard. First, you must absolutely control all media so Napolean has no chance at all to make his case to a sympathetic public. You impose a total blackout on information coming from him. Second, you allow images of Napolean to reach the public only if they destroy the sort of picture of him he wants to create. (Think of the pictures of Saddam having his teeth checked.) Since Napolean wants to appear powerful and in command, photos of him looking silly or impotent or ridiculous would serve your purpose. Finally, you would very cautiously and deliberately destroy his preferred image by controlling “leaks” of information that suggests he was vain, foolish, power-mad or some such thing. Look for weaknesses in his image as a conquering hero and start (very cautiously) a process that gradually creates an image of Napolean that is totally at odds with the way he wants to be seen.

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  17. Put him in Slope County ND and tell him he has to put out the coal fires to be set free (they have been burning in seams underground for hundreds of years).
    Or, and this is very obscure, but Steve might get it, suggested to me by the fact that I am reading a biography of James Thurber: surround him with Thurber women and Thurber dogs.

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      1. Thurber hated that movie actually.
        For those who don’t know Thurber’s stories and cartoons are full of very strong-willed, large forceful women who dominate wimpish men who cannot manage money, people, decisions, or mechanical things, but the women can. They became known as Thurber women. As you can no doubt guess,Thurber’s mother and two wives fit the bill quite nicely, especially his first wife who drove him to success, according to everyone who knew them, including his second wife.
        He also drew many pictures of droopy, morose dogs, despite the fact that he was a dog-lover.

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      2. Danny Kaye does seem a bit charismatic to play Walter Mitty, but I want to see him give it a go anyway.

        I can think of no greater torture for someone of Napoleon’s ego than to be not taken seriously.

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  18. Well, Jim and I are in for HMS Pinafore on Wednesday night. Who else? Be sure to send email to PJ at her email 1/2 page above. $20 is a mighty cheap ticket to the Guthrie — and it would be so fun to see other folks there!

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  19. How about an isolated island in the boundary waters or Quetico? There is ample firewood, not as much threat of bears as there is on the mainland, much beauty such as sunsets, northern lights, and stars but the mosquitoes in the summer and the long cold winter would provide enough torture to keep him in check.

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