“Elvis was not first; I was the first son of a gun out here, me and Chuck Berry. And I’m very sick of the lie…You know, we are over that black-and-white crap, and that was all the reason Elvis got the appreciation that he did. I’m the dude that he copied, and I’m not even mentioned…I’ve been out here for 50 years, man, and I haven’t ever seen a royalty check.” Bo Diddley, 1928-2008.
Category: History
Outside, it’s America.
Hello all. After a long week of moving, cleaning, filling up a nearby storage unit, and unpacking the mobile dissertation office, Berk and I are back on the grid: He’s acclimatizing (again) to my parents’ house, and I’m acclimatizing (again) to the strange and seemingly unsustainable environment that is late-stage car culture. In order to procure a bag of dog food, we drove along the highway for two exits, pulled into one of an endless sea of strip-malls with parking lots the size of Morningside Park, and entered a super-air-conditioned palace, brimming over with a cornucopia of All Things Pet-Related. Now, I understand this is highly normal, but it seemed really bizarre at the time. Hey, it’s been awhile.
At any rate, the move out of New York is complete. And, notwithstanding a few more occasional moments of in-transition disorientation, I expect my southern roots will soon reassert themselves (particularly after several more visits to Chick-Fil-A, Cracker Barrel, and the like.)
Death Wish.
“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.” A Freudian slip, or just the Mother of all Gaffes? Classy to the end, Sen. Clinton, perhaps inadvertently, blurts out her Vulture Strategy. Now, that should go over like gangbusters. Ugh, go away already.
Update: “Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, reacting to Mrs. Clinton’s comment through a spokeswoman, said only, ‘This is beyond the pale.’“
Update 2: In a special comment tonight, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann blew a gasket over Clinton’s remarks, and offered a concise and damning litany of the ridiculousness Sen. Clinton has subjected us to over these past few months. To be honest, I think Olbermann is pretty far over the top here. That being said, the riff beginning at 7:13 is very worthwhile.
Great Borah’s Ghost!
A busy day traffic-wise here at GitM: In a speech before the Knesset today, Dubya compared Obama to Sen. William Borah of Idaho (and not in complimentary fashion, although that case could be made too.) Here’s GWB: “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.“
Now, as it turns out, Sen. Borah was the subject of my undergraduate thesis and features prominently in my dissertation. So, notwithstanding the self-serving idiocy and sad invoking of Godwin’s Law in Dubya’s words, I do want to take a moment to defend Sen. Borah, before — just as Philip Roth Cheneyed up Burton Wheeler — he disappears down the memory hole and is reinvented as simply a kneejerk reactionary. (I know Dubya brought him up to bash as a weak-kneed surrender-monkey, but I’ve also read several left-leaning comments out and about today that make note that Borah was a Republican, and thus belongs in Dubya’s camp. He really doesn’t.)
However wrong he was about Hitler in his final years, and obviously he was very, very wrong (although not perhaps as wrong as George Prescott Bush), Sen. Borah is neither the apostle of appeasement nor the GOP stooge that Dubya and folks pushing back would respectively make him out to be today. With La Follette and Johnson, Borah was one of the leading progressives in the Senate for decades, and one of its strongest civil liberties advocates in the years after World War I. In fact, if Dubya wants to ponder aloud the words of Borah, may I suggest the following?
The men who are destroying American institutions and who are a menace to American principles are not the ‘reds,’ nor the anarchistic…but rather the men who, professing like Augustus the Great, to preserve our Constitution, are subtly and with sinister and selfish purposes, undermining them.
” — Borah to Frank Morrison, 1921.But, civil liberties aside, what should we take from Sen. Borah’s unfortunate remarks about Hitler (which he made at the age of 75, less than a year before his death?) Well, to me, it might suggest that age can cloud the judgement of all of us, even long-standing Senate mavericks much-beloved by the media. It’s just a good thing that ancient, venerable lion of the Senate didn’t win the election of 1936, eh?
Abe Lincoln and the Land of the Sundered Republic.
Lincoln laughs last? It seems that due to rewrite issues with the rumored Abbie Hoffman film, Steven Spielberg has put his Lincoln biopic back on the front-burner, to be shot right after Tintin (a la Jurassic Park/Schindler’s List and War of the Worlds/Munich.) Other than Liam Neeson and Sally Field as President and Mrs. Lincoln respectively, no other casting has been announced.
The Century that Was.
Another personal plug: As part of the online rollout for a new edition of Walter LaFeber’s The American Century, I recently composed four brief classroom essays on various 20th century events, as evaluated from a 21st century (re: ruthlessly presentist) perspective. In case anyone’s interested, they’ve now gone live: The Versailles Conference | The Military Industrial Complex Speech | The Tet Offensive | A Second American Century? Now, that’s edutainment.
Busted Rivets…
“‘The board was in crisis mode,’ one of the authors, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, who studied the archives, said in an interview. ‘It was constant stress. Every meeting it was, “There’s problems with the rivets and we need to hire more people.”‘‘ Sorry, Jack and Rose (and, of course, the 1517 real casualties): It seems the Titanic may well have foundered due to corporate cut-corners, namely substandard riveting. “Adding to the problem, in buying iron for the Titanic’s rivets, the company ordered No. 3 bar, known as ‘best’ — not No. 4, known as ‘best-best,’ the scientists found. Shipbuilders of the day typically used No. 4 iron for anchors, chains and rivets…The scientists argue that better rivets would have probably kept the Titanic afloat long enough for rescuers to arrive before the icy plunge, saving hundreds of lives.“
Exchanging your precious gifts.
They may have lost some luster due to Scott Templeton garnering one for the Whiting/Klebanow regime. Nevertheless, the 2008 Pulitzers were announced yesterday, and they included 6 for the WP, Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought in the history category and a special citation to the freewheeling Bob Dylan “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Well, ok then.
The Age of Federalism.
To give credit where it’s due, tonight’s installment of John Adams went in exactly the direction I’d hoped, spending much more time on the political and less on the personal than previous episodes. We had Hamilton and Jefferson fighting over Federalist fiscal policy, Jefferson and the Adamses debating revolution and the health of France, Citizen Genêt, the Jay treaty, the consternation of Washington over the Republican-Federalist divide, and the first transfer of presidential authority, all of which I greatly enjoyed.
I have only two minor quibbles: Some mention of the Whiskey Rebellion would’ve been grand (and could’ve been used to further dramatize Adams’ fear of the Mob, as soon to be represented in the Alien and Sedition Acts.) And, more importantly, the forgotten Founder in the series thus far has been James Madison, who — unless he’s been one of the backgrounders — has yet to appear. Even the good Doctor, Benjamin Rush, has had more screen time (although that’s probably due to his reconciliatory role in Episode 7.) Madison was in the House while Adams presided over the Senate, so shoehorning him in might’ve been unwieldy. Still, I’d have been content to have seen even a tiny nod to the writer of the Constitution — Instead of screen time, they could’ve just “cast big” a la Rufus Sewell for Hamilton, signalling Madison’s importance with a decent-sized cameo. (Now that I think about it, they should’ve done the same with Tom Paine earlier on.)
But, like I said (and my fondness for Franklin’s Parisian shenanigans notwithstanding), this was probably my favorite episode since part 2, on the Continental Congress. Heck, I even made my peace with Morse’s putty nose tonight. “I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!””
Remembering Rankin.
“Remember, Jeannette Rankin was elected before women could vote. So who says men don’t vote for a woman?” Resorting to a blatant gender pitch once more, Sen. Clinton name-drops Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, the nation’s first female representative. (She also took hold of the recent Kinsley meme: “‘Do you realize how much longer it takes for me to get ready than my opponents?” Clinton said. ‘I think I should get points for what I do, plus having to spend so much time getting ready.'”)
Just to set the record straight, Jeannette Rankin was a committed pacifist who not only led the “Jeannette Rankin Brigade” to protest the Vietnam War late in her life, but voted against American entry into both World Wars (and was the only person to vote against entry into WWII.) So, their common womanhood aside, I think it’s safe to say Rankin would be thoroughly disgusted by Clinton’s record on Iraq and Iran, and might well roundly reject the comparison.