Category: History

To the Promised Land.

“‘The world is a tough place,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘You’re never going to get out of it alive.‘” A damn dirty ape no longer, Charlton Heston, 1923-2008. (Between this and Buckley, it’s been a bad year so far for the patriarchs of conservatism.)

Update: Hmmm. After reading up on him further, it seems Heston (nee John Carter!) was a late-comer to the conservative movement, and even to the NRA philosophy: “In his earlier years, Heston was a liberal Democrat, campaigning for Presidential candidates Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. A civil rights activist, he accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights march held in Washington, D.C. in 1963…In 1968, following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Heston…called for public support for President Johnson’s Gun Control Act of 1968…He was also an opponent of McCarthyism and racial segregation, which he saw as only helping the cause of Communism worldwide. He opposed the Vietnam War and considered Richard Nixon a disaster for America. He turned down John Wayne’s offer of a role in The Alamo, because the film was a right-wing allegory for the Cold War.“

Yoo must be joking. | SSDAG.

“Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion,” said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.” (Nor, apparently, does the Fourth Amendment apply.) An unsettling memorandum by Dubya stooge John Yoo which advocates both dictatorial rule and the legality of torture is released to the public, five years later. “‘The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president’s wartime authority,’ Jaffer said. ‘The memo was meant to allow torture, and that’s exactly what it did.‘”

More than anything, I’m reminded of Lincoln’s remarks to the Indiana fourteenth: “‘Whenever I hear anyone arguing over slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.’“

And, just in case anyone was under the impression that this sort of thing only happened in the dark days of 2003, witness Attorney General Mukasey last week getting publicly verklempt and making up 9/11 tales as he goes along, all to help preserve the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps. At this point, Chuck Schumer has a lot to answer for.

The Real World Beckons.

You may have noticed it’s been quieter than usual around here over the past week. This is partly because I’ve come around to the opinion that blogging every minor twist in the Obama-Clinton primary saga has become redundant. We all know Sen. Obama is our nominee, and many of us have known it since Wisconsin back in February. (The most recent evidence of this assertion: Obama picked up a +2 delegate swing in Miss. on Thursday.) So, my inclination to cover this extended garbagetime as closely as I would an actually tight contest has grown more attentuated over the past few weeks. This isn’t to say I won’t be covering the primary anymore, just that I doubt I’ll be spending as much time on it.

More to the point, it’s also been quiet around here because I’ve been busier than usual in meatspace this week. To wit, I’ve been stripping down my apartment, throwing out all the useless junk, as per the spring cleaning norm, but also putting all but really necessary items in boxes, to prepare for my imminent departure from the Columbia environs in two months. I’m still writing at the moment, and don’t plan to defend until the fall term. Still, it’s soon time to leave this place, in preparation for either a return to writerly-type ventures in DC or an academic job search, which I plan to embark on after knowing the electoral lay of the land in November. (Or perhaps I’ll just spend a few years walking the earth like Tom Joad, ’cause you never know.)

Either way, the bills don’t pay themselves, so my non-dissertating, non-blogging time is now mostly spent looking for remunerative employ — if not a full-time gig then at least enough freelance projects to swing the summer months. We’ll see how that goes. Early feelers to Team Obama in Chicago came up blank, unfortunately (they seem more than fine in the speechwriting department anyway), and applications to some higher-profile political blog-jobs didn’t even merit a rejection letter. (Which reminds me, I have a rant about the current state of the paid political blogosphere on broil at the moment — short version: it’s effectively become as insular and echo-chambery as the Weblog Jr. High/”blogger cabal” of the early days — but I’ll save it for another post so it doesn’t come across totally as pique.) But, I’m working on other leads too, so hopefully something will shake out. (Of course, if y’all hear of anything, do let me know — the resume is over here.) In any event, if you’re wondering why it’s quieter than usual here for now, that’s why.

End of an Era.

A personal plug: Also out in stores this week, my fourth collaboration with Democratic pundit Bill Press (1, 2, 3): Trainwreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (and not a moment too soon). If you couldn’t guess from the title, it basically argues that, just as the New Deal era lasted from 1932-1968, the Age of Conservatism that began in ’64 with Goldwater, hit its stride in the 70’s and 80’s, and gave us the likes of Reagan, Gingrich, and, of course, Dubya, has now hit the proverbial, inevitable, historical brick wall. So let’s survey the wreckage: On one hand, from Katrina to Abramoff and Ed Meese to Alberto Gonzales, right-wing attempts at governance over the past thirty years have usually degenerated into dismal experiments in cronyism and/or incompetence. On the other, conservatism has strayed so far from its ideological roots in the Reagan and particularly Dubya eras that the likes of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley would never even recognize it. (Case in point, the Ron Paul candidacy, wherein a traditional Taft conservative ended up being treated by his esteemed Republican contemporaries in every debate as either a fringe joke or a terrorist-sympathizing dupe.) Either way, the right-wing ascendancy is over, and it’s our time again now (and, though it’s not reflected in this tome, I think y’all know who I’d prefer to be carrying our progressive standard into battle in 2009 and beyond…)

The Constitution Made Whole.

“Not one lawyer in 100 can identify Ohio congressman John Bingham as the main drafter of the 14th Amendment. Yet Bingham is a fascinating historical figure: he served in Congress in the 1850s as the country was torn apart and in the 1860s as it was stitched back together. He was a federal judge and the nation’s minister to Japan. As a prosecutor, he convicted John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators, and as a member of Congress he gave closing arguments in President Andrew Johnson impeachment trial. All that, plus he drafted Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which is perhaps the single most important paragraph of our Constitution.” Over at TNR, Doug Kendall pleas with Obama and others to remember the Reconstruction amendments.

Of Fact and Fiction.

“Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as ‘the novel’ was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called ‘novel.’ In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.” By way of The Late Adopter, historian Jill Lepore surveys the origins of — and often-thorny relation between — history and the novel.

Birth of a Nation.

“‘He United the States of America’ is the miniseries’ motto, giving credit to Adams for everything. Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) is a rascal; Washington (David Morse) is a sapskull. Jefferson (Stephen Dillane) is distracted and, finally, deluded. And poor Thomas Paine seems never to have been born…“John Adams” is animated as much by Adams’s many private resentments as by the birth of the United States. It is history, with a grudge.” Speaking of Jill Lepore, her review of HBO’s John Adams appeared in The New Yorker a month or so ago. Now that we’re four weeks in, I’ll say that John Adams has worked as a decently acceptable Sunday night methadone for early Wire withdrawal. I particularly enjoy Stephen Dillane’s Jefferson, and (like many Americans of the early national period, I’d presume) would rather spend more time with him than with Giamatti’s Adams. Tom Wilkinson’s Ben Franklin is also worth relishing, but he’s somewhat hamstrung by the fact that virtually every other line he gets is one of Franklin’s famous epigrams. (The jury’s still out on David Morse and his putty nose — I’ll reserve judgment until after Washington’s presidency next week.)

My biggest problem with the show thus far, and this reflects my own historical biases more than anything else, is the sheer amount of time spent on John and Abigail’s relationship and family trials. This is not to say I’m totally averse to the social history: The smallpox inoculation, for example, was a intriguing addition to Episode 2. But, more often than not, I’d rather see much more birthing of the United States and much less of the domestic drama. Tonight’s episode, for example, spent more time on the respective travails of the Adams children than it did on the writing of the Constitution. Now, granted, this is partly because John Adams had very little to do with said writing (although you’d get no sense here that he was nevertheless defending it from afar.) Still, Adams and Jefferson discussed our founding charter for only one brief scene, thus shoehorning Jefferson’s thoughts on generational revolution, Franklin’s “republic, if you can keep it” riposte, Jefferson as “the American Sphinx,” the brewing of the Adams-Jefferson conflict, and the venerable undergraduate essay question, “Was the Constitution a continuation or repudiation of the American Revolution?,” all into five or so minutes. As a political history aficionado, I eat this stuff up like catnip. But then there’s at least 30-40 minutes devoted to John and Abigail doing variations on their Saltpeter-Pins schtick, and/or Sarah Polley and the rest of the Adams kids all grown up, courting and drinking. (Gasp!)

Now I understand McCullough’s book is above all else a biography, and some of this is par for the course. But — call me old-school, top-down, whatever — I’m really hoping the final three episodes, and particularly the next two on the “Age of Federalism,” spend significantly more time concentrating on the affairs of the early republic, and both John and Abigail’s important role in them, than on the domestic bliss and family squabbles of the Adamses themselves.

C-Webb Retires.

“‘I really didn’t want to rehab and come back this season because I don’t think that was possible,’ Webber said. ‘Plus, because the way the team is playing, the chemistry is great with these guys, they’re on a roll. I feel like they’re going to win, they have a great chance to go very far in the playoffs. I just felt it was time to let the game go and be able to be happy about what I accomplished without trying to keep coming back.’” Undone by knee injuries, longtime NBA forward Chris Webber calls it quits. (He had recently returned to the Golden State Warriors.)

I always liked C-Webb, and wish he’d won a ring with one of the early-00’s Sacramento outfits. On the debit side of the ledger, there’s his unfortunate timeout and, more importantly, his criminal contempt plea in his perjury trial (concerning loans he received from a booster while at Michigan.) But, still, you have to have some respect for a guy who parlays his NBA millions into an impressive and widely-circulated African-American history collection (probably the coolest basketball-related public project this side of fellow Warrior alum Adonal Foyle’s campaign finance reform group.)

The New Deal fights on.

“Despite sustained efforts to tear down the New Deal — from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 to President George W. Bush’s ill-fated 2005 efforts to dismantle Social Security — the 1930s-vintage infrastructure has proved remarkably durable…Although the Tennessee Valley Authority has yet to pitch in, four 70-year-old agencies are helping to cushion the blow of the housing bust. Let’s count them.” Slate‘s Daniel Gross examines how the New Deal is working to mitigate today’s credit crisis. (He also has a funny line about Sen. Clinton’s bizarre call yesterday to have Greenspan wave a magic wand to fix things: This “is a little like Chicago appointing a cow to a panel on preventing disastrous fires.“)