History Archive

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Happy “The LA Riots Began 20 Years Ago Today” Day

By
Tom OHare
– April 30, 2012

I was born in 1983, so just about the only thing I remember from the LA Riots was the famous In Living Color sketch seen below (which I would wager Hulu paid for rights to in light of the anniversary, as it’s nowhere to be found on YouTube). That this is my only memory of the riots was almost inevitable: I was eight years old when they happened and barely self-aware. But I think it also points to the fact that we never know how history will be written. World historical events are happening all the time, and though I can think of dozens and dozens that I’ve lived through off the top of my head (while assuming that I would be making the opposite point prior to, y’know, actually coming up with the list, and thus changing my mind somewhat, if not entirely, as demonstrated below), I never can tell what will be important to generations hence. What will my children’s history teachers tell them about my formative years? Will they even get that far? (Lord knows, in my own American public school education the entire latter half of the twentieth century — which is Pretty Fucking Important — was always sequestered to the last week and a half of the term, during which time most of us were thinking about summer vacation or Christmas presents, not the Cuban Missile Crisis or Vietnam or the rise of modern conservatism heralded by Nixon and Reagan [Needless to say, we never made it as far as George H.W. Bush, as being alive during the time of his administration we were presumed to have understood its ramifications.].) Am I to be their historian? I may have minored in the subject, and I may have even focused on its American aspect, but as much as it pains me to say it, I am fundamentally cynical about the whole endeavor. I know things change. I know things get faster, better, smarter. But we don’t. Email doesn’t make us more productive, it makes us more casual. Google maps doesn’t make us better navigators, it makes us considerably worse! And Siri! Don’t get me started on Siri. I’ve already seen your handwriting, and it’s atrocious. Soon you fools won’t even know how to type.

Which is of course all very hyperbolic and overwrought, as is the intention; I’m not the Luddite I sometimes claim to be. I mean, I have a blog, for crying out loud. I have an iPod, too! But for me the questions remain. How do I explain a road atlas to my children when they will never have to use one? How do I describe the transition from the 40-hour work week to the always-connected work world — how do I explain that it wasn’t always so? How can I communicate what it was like on Barack Obama’s inauguration night, in the penthouse of some schmancy hotel in Seattle for Chris Gregoire’s (D-WA) reelection party, having earlier cried (drunk) listening to Obama’s acceptance speech as it blared over loudspeakers and was projected on the big screen in a ballroom of said schmancy hotel; chandeliers and all, women with manicures in evening gowns, men with hair product and hair parted and expensive cologne and wearing tailored suits (me in a sweater over a button down, Dockers and sneakers). Then 46th floor, early for Gov. Gregoire’s party, not giving a damn about some silly state pol whose reelection gala we were ostensibly there for when a black man — a black man! — named Barack Hussein Obama had just been elected President of the United States of America. A fucking dude named that, who looked like that! In this country! And eating her hors d’oeuvres before anyone else had arrived, drinking the red wine and Red Hook, looking over Seattle, rainy and purple in the evening light, chewing on Nicotine gum, because Washington state, like damn near all of them in this godforsaken country, just can’t get sanctimonious enough. And how to explain how hopeful I felt as a Young American in an election determined in large part on the backs of other Young Americans. And how hypocritical as a young, white man to take any sort of credit for it at all. Then not caring. Not caring because we had done something for once. And I was too happy right then and there, if you can forgive me for it.

And yet how difficult and complicated things have been ever since.

Twenty years from now, when my children are teenagers and dilettantes, I only hope that they’ll be able to acknowledge that I might have something or other to say about the whole thing. About my history, about what I was aware enough to experience. I don’t know what they’ll be asking about, but I can’t say that I care. All that matters is that I have something to say. This is how history is made, after all.

Anyway, here’s that video I was talking about.

(Sorry about the ad if there’s an ad.)

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Male Facial Hair Fads of the 1870s

By
Tom OHare
– March 5, 2012

Below is a picture of Mark Hanna (via), President William McKinley’s legendary campaign manager, from 1877 — prior, that is, to his attaining of such national and historical prominence. Hanna was kind of like the Roger Ailes and Karl Rove woven into one thick, combed, tamped glob of a 19th Century beard of his day, which, as mentioned, was the late 19th Century. Witness:

If you make a hundred copies of this photo and post them around Williamsburg in Brooklyn, dudes will be shaving off their sideburns and grooming these bad boys tomorrow morning. And then, inevitably, in a couple of months someone will take it all a bit far and grow out some Gandalf/Hanna hybrid pointy-thing with, like, razor blade braids at the tip, and everyone will suddenly snap out of it: “Wait a minute, guys, what were we thinking with this whole thing anyway? When did we go so collectively astray?” But of course they haven’t. All this has happened before, and will happen again. If the tea party had its way, after all, our 65 government officials would be forced to wear powdered wigs, waistcoats, hoop skirts, and stockings. Oh, who am I kidding? Women wouldn’t be allowed in government! Hoop skirts are out.

I will, however, keep the blue jeans, thanks. If the 1870s were a disaster in every other way for the American fashion sensibility, at least they gave us blue jeans.

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Jesus didn’t care about abortion

By
Ben Nolan
– February 27, 2012

The Jesus of the gospels was a bit of a hippie. Not totally or always (Matt 10:34-35, not so hippie-ish), but more often than not. Mike Lux over at the HuffPo put together some numbers (always a dubious game, but it has its uses). Money quote:

In fact, as I noted in my piece about Todd Akin, Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses.

That is a lot of verses, 258 by my count, where Rick Santorum’s savior and George W. Bush’s favorite philosopher sounds like a tried and true, solid to the core, far-out, lefty liberal. And all those where Jesus sounds like a conservative? I couldn’t find a single one. He never once condemns abortion, even though it was very common in ancient times.

That last bit really struck me. Maybe partially because I’m chin deep in the Game of Thrones books (crack, but really, really good crack), and there’s a kindof morning-after pill called “Moon Tea” that almost all of the adult female characters casually reference having taken at some point or another, and in at least one instance a character (Queen Cercei) references a more dramatic procedure she underwent when she actually did become pregnant. (The books are set in a feudal fantasy universe.)

All this is to say that I was primed, when I read the bolded sentence above, to smack myself on the forehead because OF COURSE people have been getting abortions forever, and OF COURSE forever includes 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem and surrounding areas.

What I’m saying is, dude is right, it’s pretty ridiculous that THE locus of religious political identity for what seems like the vast majority of the most politically vocal Catholics and Protestants in North America is abortion when Jesus didn’t care enough to say anything even close to explicit about it.

(For your interest, here’s the best Biblical case for abortion opposition I was able to turn up in a lazy Google search — lemme know if you find a better one. This one makes A LOT of interpretive leaps.)

It occurs to me that one might argue that Jesus didn’t talk about abortion because, as a man, he may not have known about it. I call BS on that line for two reasons: (1) He hung out with prostitutes. (2) He’s supposed to be God.

So why is abortion THE issue for so many of these folks?

In addition to Game of Thrones, I’ve been reading this book called “Faces of the Enemy” — a psychoanalytic investigation of propaganda cartoons portraying, you guessed it, the faces of whatever enemy the propaganda was out to monsterrify (<3 making up words). One motif the book identifies as almost always coming into propaganda campaigns is “enemy as baby-killer.” Everyone has used it, and they’ve used it because it works. It’s in our brain stems that babies are for protecting, and few things are harder wired (breathing, maybe).

This is exactly the rhetoric the abortion issue opens up for political Christians of a certain rightward bent — a very powerful one (not like that “love your enemy” broth Jesus kept ladling), as far as provoking emotion-driven responses in people, and action that serves your ineterest. Political people like power more than almost anything. Therefore, political Christians of a certain rightward bent love the abortion issue. Q.E.D. 

(Hat-tip to TMM for posting the article on fb)

PS – Here’s a Wikipedia entry on “The History of Abortion.” Teaser:

The first recorded evidence of induced abortion, is from the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE.[3] A Chinese record documents the number of royal concubines who had abortions in China between the years 515 and 500 BCE.[4] According to Chinese folklore, the legendary Emperor Shennong prescribed the use of mercury to induce abortions nearly 5000 years ago.[5] Many of the methods employed in early and primitive cultures were non-surgical. Physical activities like strenuous labor, climbing,paddling, weightlifting, or diving were a common technique. Others included the use of irritant leaves, fasting, bloodletting, pouring hot water onto the abdomen, and lying on a heated coconut shell.[6] In primitive cultures, techniques developed through observation, adaptation of obstetrical methods, and transculturation.[7]Archaeological discoveries indicate early surgical attempts at the extraction of a fetus; however, such methods are not believed to have been common, given the infrequency with which they are mentioned in ancient medical texts.[8]

Interestingly, while Jesus didn’t seem to care about it, the Romans apparently did, though they didn’t see it as baby killing:

Paulus wrote in his Sentences that “those who administer a beverage for the purpose of producing abortion, or of causing affection, although they may not do so with malicious intent, still, because the act offers a bad example, shall, if of humble rank, be sent to the mines; or, if higher in degree, shall be relegated to an island, with the loss of a portion of their property. If a man or a woman should lose his or her life through such an act, the guilty party shall undergo the extreme penalty.” And also Ulpian, as it appears in the Digest regarding to the instutition of curator ventris (protector of the womb): “An unborn child is considered being born, as far as it concerns his profits”.

Suzanne Dixon, a senior lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland, writes that abortion was a threat to traditional power structures in the classical Roman world. A husband had power over his wife, her body, and their children. She explains that writings from the classical world portray abortion as expressions of an ideological agenda where men maintain or reestablish patterns of power between the sexes, not as information about historical realities.[25]:27Punishment for abortion in the Roman Republic was inflicted as a violation of the father’s right to dispose of his offspring.[11]:3Because of the influence of Stoicism, which did not view the fetus as a person, the Romans did not punish abortion as homicide.[26]

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FDR had a toga party on his 52nd birthday.

By
Tom OHare
– January 26, 2012

(via)

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It’s like the Civil War, except with elephants!

By
Ben Nolan
– January 25, 2012

“It” is the counterfactual history in which Abraham Lincoln had accepted the war elephants offered to him by the King of Siam.

Siamese war elephant, circa 1866, sans armor:

 

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Happy MLK Day

By
Tom OHare
– January 16, 2012

And here’s Charlie Pierce, in a beautiful essay, on being a child of the Civil Rights movement.

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HAPPY PEARL HARBOR DAY!

By
Tom OHare
– December 7, 2011

An old friend of mine was born on December 7th, and occasionally while we were at the local park being nitwit-teenagers, a fat developmentally disabled guy would wander in and begin talking to us. My friend, Steve, would quiz him: “What’s my birthday?” and the gentleman would reply, “D-Decem-December 7th-December 7th, 1941,” which was about 42 years off the mark, but still, credit where credit is due, you know?

That’s all I got. Happy Pearl Harbor Day!

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The Future Was Yesterday

By
Tom OHare
– December 2, 2011

Here is Frederick Rudolph, writing the introduction to “Essays on Education in the Early Republic,” a collection of, you guessed it, essays on the idea of education in colonial America. The collection was published in 1964:

“Anyone who has been to California recently knows that he is in the presence of the future. He may not like everything that he finds there, but he cannot escape a deep sense that this is where we have been heading all along — a world where everyone is young, including the aged and the retired, and where no one works, except teachers. Californians either play in the sun or go to school, and many of them do both at the same time. In the end, when affluence and automation have at last freed all men from the burden of physical labor so that all might pick of the burdens of mind and of heart, California will be indistinguishable from the University of California and all its many satellites. It almost is now, but the extent to which we are nearly everywhere becoming a nation of students and teachers has been hidden from us by our failure to recognize the sum of the parts that make this conclusion inescapable. Retirement comes earlier and lasts longer, vacations are longer and more frequent, marriage comes earlier and the child-rearing days come to an end earlier, and every year we push forward the terminal year of formal education from hundreds of thousands of young men and women.

“How did we get here? With what philosophical foundations and with what social intentions? What may have accelerated or slowed the process? What was the role played by the national government, by state and local government, by the institutions and practices of the economy, by natural and material abundance, by invention, by our history as a nation of immigrants, by measurable and unmeasurable qualities of the people themselves?

I took the book home, of course, because my sister is a teacher, or on her way to becoming one, and I figured that seminal writings on education from our nation’s framers might make for some good reading. More importantly, I couldn’t sell it, and if I can’t sell a book, I can’t do much more good for it than keep it. I’ve kept a lot of books. Some of them I even could have sold. Life is a tricky thing, when you get right down to it. But I can appreciate me some books.

Lest you’ve forgotten where I was going with this (which okay, I had, too, until a moment ago) the point is that WE USED TO BELIEVE THIS SHIT. THE SHIT QUOTED ABOVE — WE USED TO REALLY BELIEVE IN OURSELVES AS A COUNTRY, AS A UNIFIED SOCIO-ECONOMIC-POLITICAL ENTITY! AS RECENTLY AS 1964! It’s kind of sad, really, looking back at the whole thing. When did we decide that the itsy bitsy arc of progress was too steep to climb? When did we decide to retreat as quickly as possible? When did we decide that Reagan was right, and that the poor deserved their squalor?

Needless to say, the UCal system is currently in shambles, as Aaron Bady has documented for the past few months. Everything is going to hell. I wasn’t even alive for all the false hope and utopianism of the 1960′s and I already miss it. Sometimes it’s just, “I’ll be damned.” Sometimes you just wonder what this country could have been if it’d just put its mind into it a bit more. In forty short years we’ve gone from California being a dream to California being a nightmare. California is a beautiful state. But it’s also a backwater. It’s a state intent on destroying itself, come hell or high water.

I suppose we’ll see what happens.

UPDATE BY TREVOR: California is the worst run state in the nation.

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On Class Warfare

By
Tom OHare
– September 26, 2011

What kind of phenomenon is Tom Friedman? What does he think about as he sips his morning coffee? Does he honestly believe that the United States would be a better place if his particular brand of “enlightened” oligarchy were to be implemented? Could he possibly endorse the tripe he peddles in the nation’s most important newspaper twice a week? Would he maintain that it’s worth the salary he makes, the position of influence he holds? What does he really think of himself? Does he go to bed satisfied with the life he’s led? Does he have regrets? Can the sheer lack of self-awareness that he demonstrates in column after column really and truly be genuine? What makes the Mustache of Understanding tick?

I bring these questions up because The Friedman wrote a particularly egregious column today. Or, if not particularly egregious, then at least rather telling. In the process of whining about how we need Leadership For A Grand Bargain Otherwise Herbert Hoover, Friedman lays all of his cards out on the table:

All I know is this: If either of you [Boehner and Obama] had been a real leader truly committed to a Grand Bargain — which you both know is what we need — you wouldn’t have just walked away from your negotiations. You would have taken the issue to the country and not let up until the other guy came back to the table.

Instead you both mumbled publicly about a Grand Bargain and how you were prepared for it but the other guy folded — and then retreated to your bases. Boehner went back to his base, arguing that more tax cuts can get us out of this, and Obama moved back to his base, with his focus on taxing millionaires. (In my next life, I want to be a member of the “base” — any base. They seem to have so much more fun and influence.)

That’s it. That’s Tom Friedman. Sorry there’s so much bold, but it really needs to sink in for a second. So let’s unpack this really quickly.

First, “all [he] know[s] is” completely wrong. Let’s take it one step at a time. 1) Obama offered the Republicans everything but the kitchen sink (though he did offer some of the dishes!) for the Grand Bargain, 2) Boehner couldn’t get his nutbag caucus in line because he’s facing a power struggle with Eric Cantor, who epitomizes House Republican craziness, 3) Republicans threatened to ruin the economy if they didn’t get everything they wanted, 4) …? 5) “Both sides do it!!!”

The “neither of you is a TRUE leader, nyah!” stuff is equally repellent. Again, Friedman is a man who gets paid — paid very well! —  to follow politics very carefully, but his analysis reads like that of someone with absolutely no knowledge of how the wheels of American government work. He’s too thick to realize that there was nothing that either of these leaders could do at the time. Obama could not allow his presidency to adopt a full-metal wingnut economic policy if he expected to be taken seriously as a Democrat in the next election; Boehner could not control his caucus, and very nearly lost his speakership over the debt ceiling, “Grand Bargain” fiasco. The country was quite literally held hostage by an intransigent group of extreme Republicans — highlighting, in fact, the crises our democracy might more regularly undergo if these people are given more power — but Friedman treats it as though it’s a lack of leadership that brought us to this place. “If you were real leaders, you wouldn’t have walked away from negotiations,” Friedman says, but did it ever occur to him that you can’t negotiate with nihilists — even if, as in Boehner’s case, you happen to share a good part of your endgame with them?

Of course it didn’t, because that was two months ago, and Friedman’s ideological filters have since transformed what actually happened into what he would prefer to have happened. Which, of course, goes like this: Left = bad, right = bad, center = good. Both sides do it, and there is no monopoly on truth, regardless of what the facts are.

The real tell, though, the part that I thought was revealing, was this (which I’ll quote again in full, for the lazy):

Instead you both mumbled publicly about a Grand Bargain… and then retreated to your bases. Boehner went back to his base, arguing that more tax cuts can get us out of this, and Obama moved back to his base, with his focus on taxing millionaires. (In my next life, I want to be a member of the “base” — any base. They seem to have so much more fun and influence.)

Nowhere in this “analysis” does Friedman assess the merit of the two bases’ arguments. For him, and other Village centrists, bases are irrational by definition, so there’s no need to investigate any further. Case closed, as it were. But what’s most galling is Friedman’s assertion that he’s not part of any base — that, moreover, the “bases” he so clearly disdains seem to have much more “influence” than people like him. Let me make this as plain as I can.

Earlier in the column, Friedman advises Obama, et al:

…[U]nlike [Herbert] Hoover, who was just practicing the conventional economic wisdom of his day when we fell into the Depression, you have no excuses. We know what to do — a Grand Bargain: short-term stimulus to ease us through this deleveraging process, debt restructuring in the housing market and long-term budget-cutting to put our fiscal house in order.

What kind of history is this? Amity fucking Shlaes? “We know what to do,” Friedman says, “and yet I’m going to pretend that the Roosevelt administration didn’t exist, that John Maynard Keynes didn’t exist, and that my fellow columnist Paul Krugman does not exist. Because history is just a set of facts, and grand narratives are so much more fun, even when they’re wrong.”

Which brings me back to Friedman’s assertion that he is of no base, but that he sincerely wishes he were because of all the “fun” and “influence” he would have. It brings me back to my rhetorical questions in the beginning, which can be summed up basically as, “Does Tom Friedman have a soul, and if so, how hard is he going to hell anyway?” The answers to which are simply, “No,” and “Very.” Friedman is a man who will do everything in his power to make sure that people like him, the political taste-makers and shot-callers, are comfortably sated till the day they die. He will peddle transparent crap like “entitlement reform” while decrying Obama for his “focus on taxing millionaires,” of which he is, of course, one. He will claim to be of no party or clique, and then shamelessly plug for the very wealthy under the guise of speaking for the hardworking man everywhere.

Of course, your everyday New York Times reader doesn’t have digs quite like this:

Nor does your everyday Times reader support “entitlement reform.” (Though, curiously, she does endorse higher taxes on millionaires.)

But then, Tom Friedman isn’t exactly your average Joe. He just plays one on TV.

Tom Friedman can call for slashing Social Security benefits because he’ll never have to rely on them. He can talk about raising the Medicare eligibility age, because his financial adviser informed him that he was a fucking multimillionaire and he will never ever be without leisure, never mind without a refill of a prescription. He can call for short term stimulus and long term austerity, because he’ll be fine either way. It’s all of a piece with Tom Friedman. He represents the interests of the very well-off to an audience of the well-off and the fairly well-off; he disguises it as sober analysis amid a flurry of cliches; and then he cashes his check and goes home to his mansion. He goes back to his base. His base isn’t left or right. It’s that sweet spot right in the middle, the one that caters to the interests of the wealthy under the patina of being above the fray. It’s the visage of cool, calm, and collected centrism — the “both sides do it” nonsense. The epitome of intellectual laziness: “In the final analysis, splitting the difference is the only sensible policy.” That mentality has never made less sense than it does now, as one of the country’s two political parties has been taken over by complete loons.

Nevertheless, you can count on people like Tom Friedman to keep counseling us about the error of our ways. “We don’t compromise enough,” he’ll warn. “We need to bargain more grandly! Everyone’s opinion is valid, there’s plenty of blame to go around (except when it comes to people like me, of course — it’s you left- and right-wingers who are the real problem).”

“Are they stupid or crazy?” is a question that gets asked a lot about the Republican party these days. The answer is always, “Both.” But when we’re talking about people like Tom Friedman, or David Brooks, or Fred Hiatt, or Mark Halperin, or any of the other pundits I don’t feel like rattling off right now, I think you should add a third possibility. The question should be, “Are they stupid or crazy or craven?”

To which the answer is, “Yes.”

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By
Ben Nolan
– August 9, 2011

These two guys were huge in defining the Canadian avant garde, and Phyllis Webb was a very well recognized poet in her own right (I’ve never read her, so I can’t really say more than that). Check ‘em out:

Canadians: When was the last time you heard or saw anything like this on the CBC?

It’s pretty wonderful but it’s such a different energy, and there’s a hopeful exuberance that I wonder if anyone can really authentically sustain any more. I certainly can’t. Doesn’t stop me from loving the look of all three of them though.

(Hat-tip to MC on FB)

Great Ideas episode devoted to Phyllis Webb (the host here who was one of the founders of the show) aired a couple weeks ago. Give ‘er a listen if you’ve got the time.

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