The dissertation manuscript — deemed well-written but far too long by every reader — now goes to Top Men (as per below). After at least a few weeks of rest, I’ll start working to cut it down for possible publication. (If that never pans out, I could see myself posting it here on the site, as per my other writings from back in the day.)
At any rate, this milestone doesn’t change anything, really, about my current professional situation. Nor am I entirely clear yet on how it will end up being useful in the future. But, at the very least, this long, occasionally ignominious chapter of my life is done, and for once I didn’t end up going the Jack Burden route. And there was much rejoicing.
Also, just to let you know, I’m working on the traditional annual movie review post, but it probably won’t go live until mid-month, since two of the better-reviewed films of 2012, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Michael Haneke’s Amour, don’t arrive here in the Beltway Styx until 1/11. That also gives me another week to plug a few other holes via Netflix, like last night’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (dopey, but not nearly as terribad as I feared) and The Deep Blue Sea (a definite list contender).
In any event, happy 2013 everyone. Since we’ve made it through the Mayan gauntlet and are already living in The Future, it’s all extra time from here on out. Let’s make the most of it! Onward and upward.
While it’s been a ghost of its past self for much of 2012, Ghost in the Machine, as of this morning, has limped along to its 13th blogday. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 11, 12]
As those few of you who still drop by here now and again know — and thanks much for that — it’s been a pretty grim year ’round these parts, and no mistake. We’re coming up on nine months since, after a year and a half (and on Valentine’s Day to boot), I suddenly got deemed “boring” by the ex I was quite fond of — the same insidious adjective applied to me back in 2006 — and then swiftly unpersoned by both her and a sizable majority of my then-current social scene. (They “went with Cheryl.”) Fortunately, I had a big project to absorb myself in with the old dissertation, but that’s come at the expense of the Ghost. Unlucky Number 13, I guess.
I am fully aware that, in the great scheme of life’s problems, of course, this one is ridiculous. I mean, there are homeless guys living on the street right outside my apartment who are scraping for food in trash cans. All around the world, lousy and/or terrible things happen to decent, undeserving people every single minute of the day, from car crashes and diseases to IEDs, errant drone strikes, and Republican legislatures. But, what can I say? It hit me where I lived. If you’ve had your heart broken — and this isn’t even my first rodeo in this regard, which probably didn’t help — you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, then nothing I write here can explain how lousy much of this year has been, or make whining about it seem any less self-absorbed.
But ANYWAYS, we’ve reached the half-the-relationship mark in terms of time passed, and while my interior landscape can still be pretty Gaelic and/or even Russian at times, we’ve hopefully reached the point in the movie where I’ve fixed my own back, done lots and lots and lots of push-ups, climbed out of the pit, and inexplicably shown up in a locked-down Gotham City again in my best suit. (This also means, presumably, that I’m about to run into Alicia Keys. Oh word.) So, notwithstanding the fact that, even on a good day, Bruce Wayne is a pretty damaged dude, here’s hoping for a better Year 14 for the old blog, and for life in general.
In any case, with the dissertation finally done, I’m still figuring out what sort of big writing project and/or life project I want to take on next, and how GitM fits or doesn’t fit in to that. (This won’t be an immediate pivot. For now, I’m spending my new free time just catching up on great shows I’ve kept for this moment, like Treme, and decent shows I can now watch without creeping dissertoral guilt, like Boardwalk Empire.) I may start doing the movie reviews again, which I’ve always enjoyed writing — but they also take a lot of time without much in the way of reward. So we’ll see.
Regardless, whatever comes next in life, I expect the Ghost will move along with me in some fashion — maybe in fits and starts, but forward nonetheless. So thanks for indulging me and, if you’ve been swinging by here since the 20th century or just got lost on the Google today, thanks, as always, for stopping by.
“‘The whole era,’ concluded Bourne in disgust, ‘has been spiritually wasted.’” Let’s hope, down the road a-ways from 2012, the last few years won’t feel the same. Anyway, that line’s from the first paragraph of the now completed(!) dissertation, which I sent off to my advisor and the committee this afternoon. It’s been a very long road, and I’m sure the euphoria will take hold in a bit. As for now, I just feel as per the clip above — plus exhausted with a twinge of Comic Guy.
FWIW, the final draft, with footnotes and bibliography and all that, clocked in at 1269 pages. If anyone’s interested on what’s covered and the general layout, I posted the table of contents below. That is obviously far too long for public — or anyone’s — consumption. I mean, I wrote the damned thing and I only read, like, the conclusion and stuff…It’s about the 20’s, right?
Seriously though, I’m sure I could have condensed it more than I did. For example, here’s the part on p. 527 where I talk about how the Harding administration used the Herrin Massacre as a public relations coup against the labor movement in 1922:
“All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy.“
That goes on for about 70 pages. And I think, if I’d just worked at it a little harder, I could’ve really gotten that down to 40. Ohhhhh well.
At any rate, I’m way too tired to be blogging at the moment, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Thanks to everyone for putting up with all the navel-gazing posts about this over the past few weeks, months, and years. FWIW, the general GitM readership got a shout-out on the acknowledgments page. With that in mind, work is crazy through election day, but this site should hopefully resume to normal status updates soon thereafter. First I need to sleep for awhile, clean up my paper-, book-, and dog-hair-strewn apartment, do some more sleeping, see all the movies I’ve missed — the only one I’ve seen in months was Looper (I liked it) — take my man Berk to the park, sleep some more, get a life, stuff like that.
Also, there is still the actual defense to consider, which will happen sometime in the next two months. But I am assuming that today was the day I destroyed the Ring, and that will be more of an “I’m a scarred, melancholy badass now, so let’s kick Saruman out of the Shire” Scouring-level event. Also, I’m not counting any chickens, trust me, but I did go ahead and put the batteries in my brand-new sonic screwdriver.
Uphill All The Way: The Fortunes of Progressivism 1919-1929
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v DEDICATION ix PREFACE x INTRODUCTION 1
The Bourne Legacy 1
Progressives and Progressivism 7
Cast of Characters 12
Review of the Literature 15
Chapter Outline 17
PROLOGUE: INAUGURATION DAY, 1921 22 PART ONE: CRACK-UP: FROM VERSAILLES TO NORMALCY 30
CHAPTER ONE: THE “TRAGEDY OF THE PEACE MESSIAH” 31
An American in Paris 32
A Human Failure 40
A Failure of Idealism? 47
The Peace Progressives 52
CHAPTER TWO: THE “LEAGUE OF DAM-NATIONS” 58
Collapse at Pueblo 58
The Origins of the League 61
The League after Armistice 67
The Third Way: Progressive Nationalists 71
The Treaty Arrives in the Senate 79
The Articles of Contention 82
Things Fall Apart 94
Aftermath 107
CHAPTER THREE: CHAOS AT HOME 111
Terror Comes to R Street. 112
The Storm before the Storm. 116
Enemies in Office, Friends in Jail. 133
Mobilizing the Nation 139
The Wheels Come Off 146
On a Pale Horse 150
Battle in Seattle 157
The Great Strike Wave 162
Steel and Coal 170
The Red Summer 184
The Forces of Order 193
Mr. Palmer’s War 205
The Fever Breaks 220
The Best Laid Plans 229
CHAPTER FOUR: THE TRIUMPH OF REACTION: 1920 241
A Rematch Not to Be 241
The Man on Horseback 245
The Men in the Middle 250
I’m for Hiram 254
Visions of a Third Term 257
Ambition in the Cabinet 260
The Democrats’ Lowden 263
The Great Engineer 265
The Smoke-Filled Room 275
San Francisco 285
A Third Party? 296
Mr. Ickes’ Vote 318
Countdown to a Landslide 331
The Triumph of Reaction 347
PART TWO: CONFRONTING NORMALCY 356
CHAPTER FIVE: THE POLITICS OF NORMALCY 357
The Harding White House 357
Organizing in Opposition 373
Lobbies Pestiferous and Progressive 393
The Taint of Newberryism 400
The Harding Scandals 409
Tempest from a Teapot 417
CHAPTER SIX: LEGACIES OF THE SCARE 439
The Education of Jane Addams 440
Prisoners of Conscience 444
The Laws and the Court 458
The Shoemaker and the Fish-Peddler 474
The Shame of America 491
The Right to Organize 518
Professional Patriots 547
CHAPTER SEVEN: AMERICA AND THE WORLD 565
The Sins of the Colonel 565
Guarding the Back Door 575
Disarming the World 589
The Outlawry of War 606
The Temptations of Empire 620
Immigrant Indigestion 650
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DUTY TO REVOLT: 1924 671
Indian Summer 671
Now is the Time… 679
Hiram and Goliath 692
Coronation in Cleveland 712
Schism in the Democracy 723
Escape from New York 736
Fighting Bob 755
Coolidge or Chaos 767
The Contested Inheritance 777
Reds, Pinks, Blues, and Yellows 789
The Second Landslide 806
PART THREE: A NEW ERA 823
CHAPTER NINE: THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA 824
Two Brooms, Two Presidents 824
A Puritan in Babylon 833
Hoover and Mellon 842
Business Triumphant 865
CHAPTER TEN: CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION 883
A Distracted Nation 884
The Descent of Man 902
The Problem of Public Opinion 908
Triumph of the Cynics 925
Scopes and the Schism 946
Not with a Bang, But a Whimper 963
New World and a New Woman 975
The Empire and the Experiment 1017
CHAPTER ELEVEN: NEW DEAL COMING 1049
A Taste of Things to Come 1049
The General Welfare 1056
The Sidewalks of Albany 1073
For the Child, Against the Court 1082
The Rivers Give, The Rivers Take 1094
CHAPTER TWELVE: MY AMERICA AGAINST TAMMANY’S: 1928 1115
“What you saw, I think, anyway, was…the end product of thirty years of a Democratic Party that has slid so far to the center-right that a Democratic president found himself arguing with a ‘severely conservative’ Republican candidate over the issues of how much the Democratic president had cut out of the budget, how many regulations he’d trimmed, how much more devoted to the middle-class-kick-in-the-balls Simpson-Bowles ‘plan’ he is, and how he would ‘reform’ Social Security and Medicare — and, frankly, a Democratic president losing some of those arguments to his left.“
Hey all. Haven’t given up on the blog again, but I am in the midst of the final ascent on the old dissermatation. (With two more hopefully brief chapters to go, I just rounded page 1055. Yes, I know. This whole thing has just gotten out of hand. Ohhhh well. Everybody needs a coping strategy.) Anyways, between that and work GitM is back to being neglected for a few weeks. In the meantime, I strongly endorse this Esquire piece by Charles Pierce on exactly why Obama stunk up the bed so badly in the first Republican primary debate general election debate.
Basically, if you give America a choice between a Republican and a Republican, the Republican will win every time. The problem wasn’t Obama had an off night. The problem is this former great hope of the left actually believes Simpson-Bowles is a good idea (it isn’t) and that the deficit is a huge problem (it’s not.) Even while the Obama campaign is trying to convince us to get more than just a wee bit cult-y “For All”, the Grand Bargain train is already leaving the station.
In short, we seem to have reached a point where so many top Democrats have spent so many years doing the protective camouflage thing that they’ve completely forgotten which way is up. As a party, we are now clearly to the right of Nixon and verging on being right of Reagan. The president’s stinker of a performance on Wednesday was just a clearer-than-usual, real-time manifestation of the Democratic Party’s deeper dilemma: We have lost our way.
“At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs.“
By way a history friend, How the American University was Killed in Five Easy Steps. (Hint: It has to do with the Powell Memo.) I’m finishing up my PhD because I’m pot-committed at this point but, when anyone asks, I never recommend that they follow suit. It is UGLY out there. When the chips were down, I was fortunate enough to have a prior career in speechwriting to fall back on. Most people don’t have that luxury.
