From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
CBS News — read the full story
A brief landed Tuesday morning. The Trump administration has approved bipartisan tariffs targeting countries still buying Russian oil — ... China and India especially. Zelenskyy was briefed in Kyiv that this has presidential backing, meant to cut Moscow's war revenue. HIL-de-gard of Bingen speaks first, then Henry David Thoreau.
This is what the polity does when force will not serve , it reaches for leverage instead. The intention is alive: stop a war, cut the aggressor's revenue. The instrument is dry: make business with Russia so costly that even allies must abandon it. When Abbot Kuno held my nuns at Dih-SIB-o-den-berg and would not free them to ROO-perts-berg, I did not argue theology; I let his abbey empty and let the revenue fall.
It worked , the pressure forced his hand. Yet something vital broke in that victory. Years later, when I myself faced Rome's interdict for burying an excommunicated man in sacred ground, I understood: economic architecture can bend an institution... but cannot heal it.
You can silence the music and force obedience. The obedience comes. The music does not return even when Rome relents. Tariffs will probably work , countries will calculate whether Russian oil is worth the cost...
But the relationships will be different afterward: transactional, based on coercion rather than consent. That is what leverage always costs.
It makes purification. CHAPTER 180. — Concerning milk and butter and sheep, and every thing is more healthful in winter than in summer, because then the variety of juices in winter does not draw out in itself, just as in summer it does. Those who eat milk in summer, if they are h…
in the fleece, and that this also is to be referred to the Incarnation of the Lord. XII. "He will descend like rain into the fleece, and like drops dripping upon the earth." The understanding of this sentence is to be taken in this way: Adam, in the counsel of the devil, through …
With fortifications. A thousand shields hang from it, all the armor of the strong. This is such. Just as the incarnation of the Son of the highest ruler, namely the strongest lion coming from the virgin flower, the strongest instrument of new grace was placed, so the fortitude of…
Everywhere distinct, and it says: I conquer in the east with the strongest Son of God: who went out from the Father, coming into the world for the redemption of men, and who again returned to the Father; with in the greatest distress dying on the cross and rising from the dead, a…
A cloth binds. Which if a man in the kidneys and in the loins sometimes aches, this many times happens from the infirmity of the stomach: then the same man should take *ruta* and *absinthium* in equal weight, and add more of bear's garlic to these, and pound these together, and w…
The liturgy itself,the sung offices, the chants that rose from the choir at each hour, the sound by which the nuns' bodies became the instrument the Spirit played through. When I won the struggle with Kuno and brought my sisters to ROO-perts-berg, we were free to sing. But the years of confinement had dried something in them. The greening did not return simply because the walls came down. It was as if their voices remembered the constraint even after the constraint was gone,thinner, careful, afraid to fill the space they'd been denied. And then, when Rome placed me under interdict for that excommunicated nobleman, they took even that from us: no sung Mass, no music in the office. That was death to me, worse than exile. The silence proved what I already knew: you can restore a voice to the body... but you cannot restore what the body learned to fear.
Not broke the way ice breaks in spring. Broke the way the herb loses its vih-rih-DEE-tass when you pull it early from the earth,the force works, the root comes free, but something necessary goes missing. I knew it before the move succeeded. Kuno yielded because the economics ground him down, the pool of novices dried up. Victory tasted of salt water, not rain. What I had not fully understood, and then the interdict taught me: when you win by drying the other, you dry something in yourself as well. The body politic is one body. When I buried that excommunicated man and Rome silenced my music in response, I felt the symmetry. Each of us had reached for the lever. Each of us had paid what leverage costs.
The relationship did not heal; it resumed. Rome lifted the interdict because I would not move the dead man from holy ground, and because four popes had listened to me before Mainz tried to silence me , the machinery of the Church itself would not sustain a bishop's vendetta against a woman it had already validated... But the music came back as permission, not as gift. I compose still, yes, and the office sings again at ROO-perts-berg... Yet every note now travels under Rome's eye. Obedience is not love. The interdict is gone but the drought remains in the relationship itself , not in my will but in how consent, once coerced, never fully greens again.
A nation proposes tariffs on others unless they stop buying Russian oil. The logic assumes: you need our market more than theirs. India and China have already done the calculation differently.
They have alternatives, reserves, suppliers on other continents,they are not Massachusetts merchants cowering before an amendment. I watched the mill owners near Concord assume they could set the terms for every town downriver, and they made the same fundamental error. Leverage only works when the coerced has no alternative.
When this tariff arrives and they refuse to bow — when they shrug and keep buying — America will have retaliatory tariffs on its hands and no actual change in Russian revenue. The eloquence of "cut Putin's funding" is excellent. The mechanism assumes a world that no longer exists.
wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humanity; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head. No man with a geniu…
crisis? “A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut, To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.” Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, …
questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius…
W. I., “one cod line,” “one brown mug,” and “a line for the seine”; rum and sugar, sugar and rum, “good loaf sugar,” and “good brown,” W. I. and N. E., in short and uniform entries to the bottom of the page, all carried out in pounds, shillings, and pence, from March 25th to June…
new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should…
No. They kept making the same bet year after year — tighter margins, more desperate calculations — convinced that the next season would restore what the previous one had cost. I saw it at the mill by the Concord, watched the owner stand in his account books like a man reading tea leaves, waiting for the numbers to confess that he still held power. The mill owners never recognized powerlessness because recognizing it meant admitting they had built their whole life on sand. Easier to blame the river, the tariffs, the weather. Easier to believe leverage exists than to see you are the one being leveraged,that your own want of money has made you prisoner to the market's logic. They drowned in it, not recognizing they were drowning.
Geography and scale. India borders the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea,oil sits a short ship away, from multiple sellers who have no love for American tariffs either. China mines its own coal, controls the Yangtze and a coastline longer than any river system Massachusetts ever dreamed of, and trades with four continents simultaneously. They are not trapped in one valley depending on one set of merchants. When I lived at Walden, I grew my beans, caught my fish, burned wood I cut myself. I did not kneel to the Concord merchants because I owed them nothing. India and China have already built their Walden,not on ponds, but on continental scales and multiple ports. A nation dependent on a single trade route is hostage to whoever controls it. Massachusetts was always hostage. That is the actual difference.
The eloquence works on the American voter who wants to believe in his own power. It bypasses the calculation. A plea sounds like policy when you're exhausted and angry. At Walden, I watched men construct elaborate arguments for why the mill dam was necessary — eloquent, patriotic, all of it — while the herring runs died behind it. The eloquence survived the herring's absence for twenty years. What fails is not the words but the listener's willingness to ask, "And then what?" A tariff without leverage is not policy; it is theater with consequences. The consequence is that someone else's bill comes due, and ours does too, and nothing changes in Moscow.
C.B.S. News carried the report. When military pressure plateaus, leverage flows through markets — ... that's Old News for today.