Glamour
Posted: December 29, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Kids in the midwest only get to see even modest levels of glamour if they happen to be on school trips to one or another of the midwestern cities: K.C., Omaha, St. Louis, the Twin Cities. In some, clearly, this lack of glamour festers. Charles Starkweather, in speaking about his motive for killing all those people, had this to say: “I never ate in a high-class restaurant, I never seen the New York Yankees play, I never been to Los Angeles…”
from:
Roads by Larry McMurtry
Posted: December 28, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition, travel, writing Leave a comment
I can’t get enough of these Larry McMurtry non-fiction books, as I’ve discussed before and another time and one other time. In this book, McMurtry drives American highways, writing down anything that occurs to him or seems interesting:
The most interesting thing that ever happened to me in southern Oklahoma happened when I was a boy. My backwoods uncle Jeff Dobbs took me deep in the woods, to the cabin of an aged Choctaw preacher, an old man said to have the power to draw out tumors. In his small cabin there were long rows of Mason jars, each containing a tumor that had been drown out. It was dim in the cabin. I couldn’t see what was in the jars very clearly, but it definitely wasn’t string beans or pickled peaches. I was very impressed and not a little frightened. Uncle Jeff knew a few words of Choctaw — listening to him talk to the old man was when I first realized there were languages other than English.
More than fifty years after I peered at them in the gloom of the old preacher’s cabin, the shelves of tumors reappeared in Pretty Boy Floyd, the first of two novels I wrote with Diana Ossana. This time “the cancers,” as they are referred to, appear as decoration in a backwoods honky-tonk.
He muses on how the great travel writers tend be into only one type of landscape (McMurtry’s is the plains):
Charles Doughty lived almost his whole life in a wet country but wrote his great book about the desert – the same deserts would later draw the best out of Wilfred Thesiger, St. John Philby, T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark. Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, Charles Marvin, Mildred Cable and Francesca French (the nuns of the Gobi), Curzon, and Ney Elias returned again and again to central Asia. Humboldt, Alfred Russell Wallace, and Henry Bates took their genius to the Amazon; while Mr. Darwin looked hard wherever he went. Certainly, when it came to those finches in the Galapagos, he looked every bit as hard as Picasso looked at Matisse.
Charles Doughty
But even the ocean interests McMurtry, an epic reader:
My drives across the American land had taken me far enough that I had begun to feel a vague urge to try a different mode of travel. For the past month or so I had been reading the leisurely, tolerant travel books of the English zoologist F. D. Ommanney, a man who knows a lot about fish, and a lot, also, about the world’s oceans and the people who live beside them – particularly the island peoples of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. F. D. Ommanney was a fish finder, a man who, in the years after World War II, puttered around in remote oceans attempting to estimate whether a given stretch of ocean contained fish enough to make commercial fishing profitable. I think, though, that what he cared about was the sea, not the fishing. In books such as A Draught of Fishes, The Shoals of Capricorn, Eastern Windows, and South Latitude, he describes his journeys through the seas and islands so appealingly that a landlocked person such as myself begins to feel that he has really been missing something: that is, the world’s oceans, along whose trade routes – invisible highways – the great ships proceed.
The appeal of F. D. Ommanney’s books – fairly popular in the 1950s but mostly forgotten now – is their intimacy with the sea and its ways, and also with the ways of people whose lives are bound to the sea. Conrad and Melville wrote powerfully of the oceans, but their works don’t exactly bring one into an intimacy with the world of waters. In Conrad and also in Melville the sea is too powerful, too often the environment of crisis, to be merely appealing. Though these great writers see the ocean’s beauty they rarely allow the reader to be unaware that this beauty comes with a threat, moral or physical or both.
Ommanney is not a novelist – he is just a man with a deep interest in the natural world, particularly with the world of the ocean; through many travels he preserves a fond curiosity about the lives of peoples of the islands, people who can scarcely imagine a life apart from the sea.
While driving in Arizona, this occurs to McMurtry:
Near Wilcox there’s a famous tourist stop advertising THE THING – in fact an Anasazi mummy.
(actually this article seems to suggest it’s a fake made by a well-known maker of sideshow artifacts)
McMurtry gets going on the Plains Indians wars, and Ranald Mackenzie:
Mackenzie was a highly effective officer, one of the most skilled and determined to fight on the plains frontier. But he was not a happy man. Juste before he was to marry, in 1883, he went crazy and spent the remaining six years of his life in an insane asylum in New York State. Ranald Mackenzie’s insanity is one of the strange, haunting mysteries thrown up by the frontier conflicts. Many pioneer women went crazy, and it was not hard to see why; the women were not necessarily overdelicate, either. The living conditions were just too bleak, too isolating. But the insanity of Ranald Mackenzie, one of the most disciplined and succesful officers to participate in the campaigns of the plains frontier, is evidence that the price of winning the west was not simple and not low, even for the winners, not when one considers that Ranald Mackenzie, the soldier who took the surrender of Quanah Parker and the Kwahadi Comanches, ended his days in a nuthouse, in 1889, not long before the massacre at Wounded Knee.
Wikipedi tells us: “He bought a Texas ranch and was engaged to be married; however, he began to demonstrate odd behavior which was attributed to a fall from a wagon at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in which he injured his head. Showing signs of mental instability, he was retired from the Army on March 24, 1884 for “general paresis of the insane”.[5]”
The studio executives I would go and talk to about one project or another were seldom even half my age. Now they were only a little more than a third my age. I was in my sixties, the were in their twenties. SOme of them seemed puzzled that an older person would still be writing screenplays. If I happened to mention, by way of illustration, a movie made as long ago as the 1950s – twenty years before any of them were born – they looked blank and, in some cases, a little disdainful. I might as well have been talking about the Dead Sea scrolls. There is always a listener (the executive) and a note taker at these meetings. If I mentioned Touch of Evil or Roman Holiday the note taker would dutifully take a note.
I don’t know why this age gap surprised me. Hollywood, as I said, has always been about beauty and desire, neither of which is entirely comfortable with age. Garbo was not wrong to retire.
Near Acoma, New Mexico:
Coronado came past these pueblos as he sought the cities of gold, which means that the Indians of this region have experienced an unusually long colonial oppresion. Acoma, the sky city built on top of a 365-foot bluff, revolted in 1599 and killed a party of tax collectors sent by Governor Juan de Onate, who proved to be a revengeful man. He overwhelmed the Acomas, took several hundred prisoners, and cut one foot off any male over twenty years old, probably raking in a lot of seventeen- and eighteen-year old feet in the process…
I’ve been to Acoma many times, where the concessionaires are – to put it mildly – not friendly; and I’ve visited, at one time or another, most of the pueblos near Albuquerque. I’m not comfortable there and am even less comfortable in the communities north of Santa Fe. These are all places where the troubles are old and the troubles are deep. The plains below the Sangre de Christo may be supremely attractive visually, as they were to Miss O’Keefe, but socially they are very uncomfortable – the result of that long oppression. North of Santa Fe is where the toughest of the Indians and of the Spaniards survived. It’s not a good place to have a car break down – not if you’re an Anglo.
Nothing will detect and respond to the reality of fear as swiftly as a market
Posted: December 20, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
On The Interview, Stephen Carter’s take worth reading:
Despite all the calls for Sony to stand up to the blackmail in the name of artistic freedom, it seems to me that the criticism is misdirected. Nothing will detect and respond to the reality of fear as swiftly as a market, and here the market has spoken. The relevant market actors are moviegoers. Theater owners are guessing that with “The Interview” in their multiplexes, holiday audiences will stay away in droves. From everything.
I’d like to think the owners are mistaken. I’d like to think that were “The Interview” in the theaters, millions of us would flock to the mutiplex and watch a movie — any movie — as an act of protest, to show the world we aren’t afraid. But I can’t say that in predicting the opposite the theater owners have made a wrong call. And if they’re right, so is Sony.
(ht Andrew Sullivan, where the guest editors are doing a great job imo. Journalistic bias: guy who wrote The Interview Dan Stirling is former co-worker/friend, I root for him to get rich from this funny movie.)
Wild
Posted: December 20, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, movies, nature, screenwriting, the California Condition, women, writing Leave a comment
Contains WILD spoilers!
1) This movie has a high degree of difficulty.
I read 2/3s of the book Wild – abandoned it before I finished, but I did the same thing with Eat Pray Love and then years later started over and found it very impressive. Perhaps a similar fate awaits Wild & me.
At least two top-notch women I know swear by Tiny Beautiful Things. I like reading interviews with Cheryl Strayed, she seems like the real deal.
In books you can get into somebody’s head. That is their killer advantage, and why I don’t think books are going anywhere anytime soon. You just can’t do that in a movie. Wild the movie does a pretty good job of this, but it’s sort of just doomed, imo. This is a story about a person’s journey from one mental state to another, with most of the work done internally. Very hard to dramatize.
While there are good tricks towards doing that in this movie, it comes up a little short on the radical innovations needed to tell that story in a movie. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay: a dude who is good at this kind of thing, his books make excellent movies, but maybe a true writer-director could’ve worked the solutions even tighter?
[One particular note: it seemed to me like all the cutaways should’ve cut a few beats earlier. You’re always like, “ok, here we go, we’re about to cutaway to Cheryl’s childhood.”]
2) The story has a motivation problem.
Cheryl decided to do this, herself. No one made her, asked her, even cares if she accomplishes her goal. So when she faces difficulty or problems, it easy to think “well, you’re the one who decided to hike the PCT, dumdum. Why should I care about this?”
In a story, a person sets out to do something and arrives at a win/lose/draw (thanks to John Gardner for articulating that for me). What would count as a win in this story? Getting to Ashland? No, who cares about Ashland, nothing but hippies in Ashland. The goal of this story is: Cheryl restoring herself (whether or not she knows that’s the goal at the start).
But: that’s an internal goal, how will you show it in a movie? It’s easier to answer these questions in a book, where Cheryl can articulate her reasons and get you with her and make you see that this particular journey is important even if nothing tangible’s at stake.
3) Still, pretty good movie.
Despite all that I thought the ending was pretty satisfying. It’s hard to make a pretty good movie. When Reese Witherspoon yells “FUCK YOU BITCH!” I thought that was good acting.
Sometimes I think all the hugely successful actresses [Reese, Anne Hathaway, etc.] are such intense people that when they act like normal people their instinct is to be way too intense. I would argue Julianne Moore might be the best at not doing this. Think how hard that must be: to act intense but not at your full-bore intense because you somehow intuitively understand that your own “full bore” is too strong for the screen. Acting is crazy hard.
Like all criticism should, let this come with a disclaimer: it’s easy to be a critic hard to make a thing, makers > critics x1000!
4) Interesting sex stuff in this movie.
I do remember in the book being jarred by the period of sexual degradation and heroin, hadn’t realized that was part of the tale. It was new territory, I felt, in exploring a woman’s sexual… could we call it addiction? self-punishment? Cheryl’s not not in control at that point, right? But she also isn’t having a great time. It’s fucked up, she knows it’s fucked up. But it’s not fucked up because she’s a slut, it’s fucked up because she’s not being the woman she wants to be (right?).
Whatever, it made me think/was also slightly titillating/made me feel kind of bad for the husband she was compulsively cheating on. What are the nice guy husbands of America to make of Eat Pray Love and Wild, two biggest women’s memoirs of the last ten years, that both start with a woman leaving her nice guy husband for sexual adventuring?
How often in a movie do you see sex that is intended to be not rape but also not fun?
5) The music in this movie is kind of good but also kind of sucks.
That’s my take anyway. What if I told you that in 2014 we were making an epic movie about a woman’s adventure across America? Would you say that scattered samples of Simon & Garfunkel is the best we could do? Fuck no! Why didn’t they get some awesome woman to make a badass score like Eddie Vedder did for the man-equivalent, Into The Wild?
6) There’s a weird shoutout to REI in this movie.
Where Reese calls them to get new boots and is like “you’re my favorite company ever.” Maybe Cheryl really felt that way. I have a bunch of stuff from REI, but sometimes I think their business model is based on making you think going outdoors is more expensive and complicated than it really is to sell you more junk. Which, weirdly: in the same scene where Cheryl learns about REI’s return policy, the dude is like “you don’t need all this shit.”
Former REI CEO Sally Jewell is Secretary of the Interior.
Strikes me as a very Obama kind of pick: on the one hand, kind of hip and modern and innovative, but on the other hand she was still the CEO of a huge corporation.
7) Wild and Eat Pray Love are in long American literary tradition of spiritual narrative.
If I were a grad student at Yale I’d write my Ph. D. on this, trace it all back through Emerson and Puritan religious narratives and captive narratives of 18th century New England and I’d be the smartest boy in the seminar. Since I’m not in grad school though I can make my point in one sentence which is that things that seem radical and new are often just new versions of an old tradition, we’re not so different from the past or as wildly inventive as we think we are, etc.
8) Is this how women go through life? Constantly having to wonder if a random dude is a rapist?
Damn, that might be the most important aspect of Wild, seeing the world through a woman’s eyes, showing that tension of life. When I walk around at 11pm or so in my neighborhood and I see women walking their dogs it always feels very tense. My instinct to somehow indicate I am not a rapist usually just seems to make the problem worse.
ANYWAY: one reason I was excited to see Wild is I’ve been to many of the settings along the Pacific Crest Trail on fishing trips. Here, for example, is a photo of Kennedy Meadows:
Kennedy Meadows is like a plateau high up in the Sierras. To get there you drive up a crazy 27-mile twisty road up from the 395. If you find yourself there, be sure to stop at The Grumpy Bear:
They’re happy to teach you about jerking meat:
Don’t get it confused with the other Kennedy Meadows up in Sonora.
While I was up there I crossed the PCT and wondered if it would be interesting to film a couple seconds of walking on it:
If you’d like to see Wild, but only have ten seconds, my film gets at similar themes but with more nauseating camerawork.
“What Happened When Marissa Mayers Tried To Be Steve Jobs”
Posted: December 18, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, writing Leave a comment
This article, by Nicholas Carlson in the upcoming NY Times magazine, is one of the best business articles I’ve ever read (note: I don’t read that many business articles).
Here’s where the story really begins:
But as Alibaba’s stock soared, Yahoo’s dropped, an indication that the market seemed to concur with Jackson’s analysis: Yahoo’s core business was worth less than zero dollars.
That’s bad. Next sentences:
A week later, Smith published an open letter calling for Yahoo to divest itself of its Alibaba assets, return the money to its shareholders and then merge with AOL. Redundancies could be eliminated, thousands of people could be fired and two former Internet superpowers would be downsized into a single and steady (if uninspiring) entity that sold ads against its collective online properties — news, blogs and Web products like email, maps and weather. “We trust the board and management will do the right thing for shareholders, even if this may mean accepting AOL as the surviving entity,” Smith wrote.
(Note that “could be fired” — non-business readers like me often gotta remind themselves that in business articles it’s often assumed that firing people is positive.)
The article goes on with punchy, succinct, clear explanations the challenges of tech companies, and specifically the challenge Mayers faced, and I don’t envy her:
Previous Yahoo C.E.O.s had underinvested in mobile-app development, plowing money into advertising technology and web tools instead. A couple of days into the job, Mayer was having lunch at URL’s when an employee walked up to her and introduced himself as Tony. “I’m a mobile engineer,” Tony said. “I’m on the mobile team.”
Mayer responded to Tony, “Great, how big is our mobile team?” After some back and forth, Tony replied that there were “maybe 60” engineers. Mayer was dumbfounded. Facebook, for instance, had a couple of thousand people working on mobile. When she queried the engineering management department, it responded that Yahoo had roughly 100. “Like an actual hundred,” Mayer responded, “or like 60 rounded up to 100 to make me feel better?” The department responded that it was more like 60.
But then it starts to unravel:
Mayer subsequently immersed herself in the redesign. Months into her tenure, she was meeting with Sharma’s team regularly in a conference room that started to look more like a design studio: projectors hung from the ceiling, rendering screens displayed on the wall. All around, dozens of foam core boards were pinned with ideas. Mayer would regularly interrogate designers about the minutest details of display and user experience. By early December, one day before Yahoo Mail was set to release, she convened a meeting at Phish Food, a conference room in the executive building of Yahoo’s campus, to talk about the product’s color. For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.
Well, see, purple sucks? More great detail:
During a breakfast with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Mayer asked if there might be any partnership opportunities between the magazine and Shine, Yahoo’s site for women. According to Mayer’s own telling of the story to top Yahoo executives, Wintour lookedappalled.
I bet she did!
Reuters photo stolen from NY Post article “Anna Wintour Has A Sense Of Humor Over Drag Parody Show” http://pagesix.com/2014/08/12/anna-wintour-has-sense-of-humor-over-drag-parody-show-about-her/
Bad to worse:
Yahoo Tech would sometimes go weeks without running a single ad.
Don’t know much about this, but that sounds terrible.
This delinquency eventually became a problem outside Yahoo. At a major advertising event in the South of France, Mayer sat for an interview with Martin Sorrell, the C.E.O. of WPP, one of the world’s largest agencies. In front of a filled auditorium, Sorrell asked Mayer why she did not return his emails. Sheryl Sandberg, he said, always got back to him. Later, Mayer was scheduled for dinner with executives from the ad agency IPG. The 8:30 p.m. meal was inconvenient for the firm’s C.E.O., Michael Roth, but he shuffled his calendar so he could accommodate it. Mayer didn’t show up until 10.
Fuck that. Worse:
Mayer’s largest management problem, however, related to the start-up culture she had tried to instill. Early on, she banned working from home. This policy affected only 164 employees, but it was initiated months after she constructed an elaborate nursery in her office suite so that her son, Macallister, and his nanny could accompany her to work each day. Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score.
This got ugly:
During the revamping of Yahoo Mail, for instance, Kathy Savitt, the C.M.O., noted that Vivek Sharma was bothering her. “He just annoys me,” she said during the meeting. “I don’t want to be around him.” Sharma’s rating was reduced. Shortly after Yahoo Mail went live, he departed for Disney. (Savitt disputes this account.)
Then this part is deeply weird:
As concerns with Q.P.R.s escalated, employees asked if an entire F.Y.I. could be devoted to anonymous questions on the topic. One November afternoon, Mayer took the stage at URL’s as hundreds of Yahoo employees packed the cafeteria. Mayer explained that she had sifted through the various questions on the internal network, but she wanted to begin instead with something else. Mayer composed herself and began reading from a book, “Bobbie Had a Nickel,” about a little boy who gets a nickel and considers all the ways he can spend it.
“Bobbie had a nickel all his very own,” Mayer read. “Should he buy some candy or an ice cream cone?”
Mayer paused to show everyone the illustrations of a little boy in red hair and blue shorts choosing between ice cream and candy. “Should he buy a bubble pipe?” she continued. “Or a boat of wood?” At the end of the book, Bobby decides to spend his nickel on a carousel ride. Mayer would later explain that the book symbolized how much she valued her roving experiences thus far at Yahoo. But few in the room seemed to understand the connection.
Strange. But man, what great writing in this article.
Let’s give the last word to Aswath Damodaran:
Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. “We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,” Damodaran explained. “To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.” But, he went on, “it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.” He pointed out that “for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.”
from New York University’s beautifully done website: http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/
Fist City
Posted: December 16, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, music, women Leave a comment
Loretta has such an admirable way of getting right to the point.
Bulletproof
Posted: December 15, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, food, the California Condition, Tibet Leave a comment
NYTimes article about “Bulletproof,” a fad/product:
The recipe — a riff on the yak butter tea Mr. Asprey found restorative while hiking in Tibet — calls for low-mold coffee beans; at least two tablespoons of unsalted butter (grass-fed, which is higher in Omega 3s and vitamins); and one to two tablespoons of medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, a type of easily digestible fat.
and this sticks out:
Being Bulletproof means never traveling light. After a MacGyver attempt to make coffee in a Chicago hotel room, Brandon Routh, who plays the superhero The Atom on the CW show “Arrow,” now carries ground beans, containers of clarified butter, a silicone squeeze bottle of MCT oil, plus a hand blender and Aeropress filter.
“My energy levels are through the roof compared to what they used to be,” said Mr. Routh, who learned of the drink at a bachelor party, of all places. He added: “My lines just kind of sink in and they’re there when I need them.”
Here’s the thing about my human brain: Routh’s endorsement will end up “counting,” in my brain, certainly sticking way longer, than any carefully researched, cautiously presented bit of scientific evidence.
Already I’m like “well, who’s to argue with Routh? Why would he lie? Am I so arrogant as to not TRY butter coffee?”
(Separate thing: what is with our infatuation with the spiritual powers of Tibet? A strong case could be made that Tibet is a violent, backwards, cruel theocracy historically run by puppet child-monks under control of death-obsessed masters.)
© Joseph F. Rock / National Geographic Image Collection.
What?
Posted: December 11, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Not well informed on the torture report, so thanks to Andrew Sullivan for calling my attention to this NYT piece:
For all the publicity the Bush administration gave Mr. Padilla, the committee revealed that the government never took his dirty bomb plot seriously. It was based on a satirical Internet article titled “How to Make an H-Bomb,” and the plot involved swinging a bucket full of uranium over one’s head for 45 minutes. One internal C.I.A. email declared that such a plot would most likely kill Mr. Padilla but “would definitely not result in a nuclear explosive device.” Another called Mr. Padilla “a petty criminal” and described the dirty bomb plot as “lore.”
Easy to forget who you’re supposed to be rooting for as you read this thing. The goofy gang that can’t shoot straight or the fiendish torturers who’re hiding the pathetic results of their evil in a tedious bureaucratic report?
Possible to do this and still be an idiot.
Posted: December 10, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentFrom Dana Milibank in The Washington Post:
[TNR owner Chris] Hughes is no idiot (he reads Balzac in French)
Yo Monkeytrial!
Posted: December 10, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
This post is in response to my East Coast buddy Monkeytrial, who says:
We haven’t been to the moon in 42 years, and the richest 1 percent of humans own half the world’s assets.
…
I’d like to read a discussion of the psychological implications of growing up in a time of dramatic technological progress (my parents’ generation) versus consumer-focused incrementalism (my own). If any of my zero readers know and could link, much appreciated.
Hmm! Let’s think about the idea that technological progress has slowed from a rapid rate 1940-1970 to a stagnation now.
Is this true?
What does it mean?
I don’t have exactly what Monkeytrial is looking for. But through the glory of the Internet, we can converse via blog.
Some uncooked ideas inspired by him. First, a rec:
Check out Peter Thiel.
If not exactly this, he is obsessed with similar problems. He talks about ’em in his book which I recommend, thought-provoking to the max. Dude is thinking interesting thoughts at a rapid rate:
Even more on Monkeytrial’s theme is this essay, from National Review (I know, I know):
When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.
Another roundup of Thiel pessimism. This one seems to really nag at him:
The Empire State Building was built in 15 months in 1932. It’s taken 12 years and counting to rebuild the World Trade Center.
(Well, was that an engineering problem, or a political one? I don’t know a ton about New York City politics in the ’30s, but from what I understand, between former governor Al Smith as president of Empire State Inc., FDR as governor, Jimmy Walker as mayor, and James Farley supplying the building materials there was more or less a semi-benevolent mafia running the city.)
Maybe: we work in levels, like an orbiting electron?
Like, maybe we humans make big jumps, and then plateau for awhile? Nothing happened in Europe between 5oo and 1300 AD (let’s say) and then there was the Renaissance. Maybe what DFW’s characters speculate about tennis applies?:
“‘He’s talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,’ Chu tells the other three. They’re on the floor indian-style, Wayne standing with his back against the door, rotating his head to stretch the neck. ‘His point is that progress towards genuine Show-caliber mastery is slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than temperament.’
‘Is this right Mr. Wayne?’
Chu says ‘…that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’
‘Plateaux,’ Wayne says, looking at the celing and pushing the back of his head isometrically against the door. ‘With an X. Plateaux.’
Maybe: we got scared by the speed of what we were doing.
Nukes, etc.
This caused us to pull back on investment/energy in areas like nuclear engineering where there may have been big if scary advances to make?
Maybe: we were really just plucking low hanging fruit.
The Tyler Cowen theory, that there was a lot of low-hanging economic fruit, esp. in the resource rich United States, and we ate it all up and now it’s gone.
Maybe: globalization happened in one big boom.
Like, it was a closer to a one-time event than an enduring process, and it already happened, between say 1960 and 1989, as China opened, containerization blasted international shipping forward. The revolution is over, we already got the major results in the form of Wal-Mart and so on, now it’s just a matter of economic water shifting across the world until all the glasses (countries) are level, and that’s gonna look like reverse progress from here in the US.
Maybe: it only looks bad here in the US.
Sure, it seems like technological progress has stalled out since 1970~ here in the US, but it sure as hell doesn’t look like that in China, India, dunno parts of Africa, where changes from 1970-now are as rapid as 1945-1970 in the US?
Maybe: tech “progress” isn’t necessarily good.
Maybe the jarring nature of it, the disorienting and alienating effects, level out the material gains? Maybe we’re feeling some kind of technological hangover and we’re all kinda cooling it?
What about social/cultural progress?
Food. I’m eating better every year. The food a person in Los Angeles or New York can access is insanely better than it was in 1970 in terms of variety and quality. Here’s literally the first pic I found when I googled “Food 1970:”
Sex. Sexual freedom is insane now.
Art. There’s pretty much no limit on what you can do artwise in the Western World – a guy inflated a buttplug in the middle of Paris and the President of France stuck up for him.
Drugs, alternative lifestyles, dressing weird – it’s becoming pretty much a field day. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” is another puzzle but we are “progressing” very rapidly in a direction.
In less ambiguous ways, there’s been massive social progress. We’re getting more inclusive. Here’s a clearly stated example Aisha happened to put on This. today: Shonda Rhimes putting racial/gender/representational progress in sharp terms she receives the Sherry Lansing Award:
Look around this room. It’s filled with women of all colors in Hollywood who are executives and heads of studios and VPs and show creators and directors. There are a lot of women in Hollywood in this room who have the game-changing ability to say yes or no to something.
15 years ago, that would not have been as true. There’d have been maybe a few women in Hollywood who could say yes or no. And a lot of D girls and assistants who were gritting their teeth and working really hard. And for someone like me, if I was very very VERY lucky, there’d have been maybe one small show. One small shot. And that shot would not have involved a leading actress of color, any three dimensional LGBT characters, any women characters with high powered jobs AND families, and no more than two characters of color in any scene at one time — because that only happened in sitcoms.
30 years ago, I’d think maybe there’d be a thousand secretaries fending off their handsy bosses back at the office and about two women in Hollywood in this room. And if I were here, I would serving those two women breakfast.
50 years ago, if women wanted to gather in a room, well it had better be about babies or charity work. And the brown women were in one room over there and the white women were in a room over here.
What if: technological progress – the speed of it, especially – itself aggravated the wealth inequality.
Twitter was created eight years ago. It’s now worth roughly $24 billion. Have people ever, in the history of the world, gotten that rich that fast?
Also: the last period of insane technological progress culminated in a horrifying cataclysm.
from this great website: http://madefromhistory.com/world-war-one/painting/
World War I, where all those terrific machines were turned to gassing and machine-gunning each other. Then, when they were done with that, they ramped up to the next one: twice as cataclysmic (but on the other hand, very fertile for creating more technological progress).
So, maybe we should just count our stars we’re lucky we dodged that and closed out a tech boom peacefully.
And: Why should we expect things to be linear?
Maybe this Thiel idea that technological progress has “stalled” is like the weird thinking of an Asberger’s robot, human history is chaotic and works in undiagnosable, epileptic fits and starts that can’t be rationally charted.
Did the rapidity of change make us (sanely enough) feel more unsettled about predicting the future?
Maybe that itself acted as some kind of check on technological progress? The optimism of a 1960s Popular Mechanics cover
feels dated today.
Anyway, I guess my point is: check out Monkeytrial.
Two Videos
Posted: December 3, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a commentI always enjoy when friends and houseguests put me on to interesting videos. INSURANCE as these are old.
Ice Cube celebrates the Eames:
And a remix:
Let it all just drop.
Posted: December 1, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
(can’t find the credit for this photo – the Sept. 25, 2008 meeting)
Incredible ideas in the Chris Rock interview from New York magazine:
When you mentioned Bush, I thought you were going to say something else, which is that he had this “good versus evil” manner of speaking — the Western sheriff who’s come to lay down the law. Obama’s been faulted for not showing anger in public, and for not speaking in simple, declarative Bushisms. Of course, the moment he does do that, he’s accused of being an angry black man.
There’s an advantage that Bush had that Obama doesn’t have. People thinking you’re dumb is an advantage. Obama started as a genius. It’s like,What? I’ve got to keep doing that? That’s hard to do! So it’s not that Obama’s disappointing. It’s just his best album might have been his first album.
What has Obama done wrong?
When Obama first got elected, he should have let it all just drop.
Let what drop?
Just let the country flatline. Let the auto industry die. Don’t bail anybody out. In sports, that’s what any new GM does. They make sure that the catastrophe is on the old management and then they clean up. They don’t try to save old management’s mistakes.
That’s clever. You let it all go to hell.
Let it all go to hell knowing good and well this is on them. That way you can implement. You hire your own coach. You get your own players. He could have got way more done. You know, we’ve all been on planes that had tremendous turbulence, but we forget all about it. Now, if you live through a plane crash, you’ll never forget that. Maybe Obama should have let the plane crash. You get credit for bringing somebody back from the dead. You don’t really get credit for helping a sick person by administering antibiotics.
How about this?
We still have some white people taking the Sarah Palin line about blacks and immigrants alike. They want to “take back the country” — and we know from whom. I find it depressing. The increments of change seem to be so much tinier than we wanted to believe when the Civil Rights Act passed 50 years ago, or when Obama was elected in 2008.
Yeah. The stuff you’re talking about is pockets though. There’s always going to be people that don’t know that the war’s over. I’m more optimistic than you, but maybe it’s because I live the way I do. I just have a great life, so it’s easier for me to say things are great. But not even me. My brothers drive trucks and stock shelves. They live in a much better world than my father did. My mother tells stories of growing up in Andrews, South Carolina, and the black people had to go to the vet to get their teeth pulled out. And you still had to go to the back door, because if the white people knew the vet had used his instruments on black people, they wouldn’t take their pets to the vet. This is not some person I read about. This is my mother.
Or this?:
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, just came out as gay.
Which I think is actually bigger than the football player. Because the average person in that locker room is in his 20s. And it’s just not a big deal to be around a gay guy — if you’re in your 20s. Whereas Tim Cook is around these corporate guys. That is the epitome of a boys’ club. That is sexist, racist — the least inclusive group of people you’re ever going to find. Men who have no problem being called owners. Who actually wants to be called an owner, even if you owned a football team? Just the title owner is just so nasty and disgusting.
It does have a kind of antebellum ring.
So Tim Cook came out to those guys. He’s in that club. My God.
What is going ON in DC?
Posted: November 22, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a commentI gotta say, I agree with Peggy Noonan that this article in the New York Times, “Reid Is Unapologetic as Aide Steps on Toes, even the President’s,” is upsetting. Here is Ms. Noonan’s summary of its contents:
Assuming the article is factually correct, and it certainly appears to be well reported, the president of the United States phoned the majority leader of the U.S. Senate during a legislative crisis to complain that one of the senator’s staffers is a leaker. Unbeknown to the president, the staffer was listening in on the call and broke in to rebut the president’s accusation.
Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
That’s the staffer there, David Krone.
(What should we make of Harry Reid’s portrait of Twain there? There’s no way Reid is so dumb it didn’t occur to him what Twain would think of that, and him. Is choosing that portrait a sage bit of humor and humility? Or a cheap show at sage humor and humility? Plus bloody bloody Andrew Jackson? anyway there’s no time to sort all that out.)
Says the Times:
For some on Capitol Hill, Mr. Krone is a manipulative megalomaniac. For others, he is a hero who has the financial independence to speak his mind. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that he is different.
(Krone is rich I guess from being a cable TV executive as a young man?). I’m not liking this dude’s tone as presented in the article:
“I don’t remember anything about that,” Mr. Reid said in his chandeliered office on Nov. 13, a few hours after being re-elected leader of the Senate Democrats. “Do you?” he asked, turning to Mr. Krone, who was seated beside him in the “leader’s chair.”
“Umm,” Mr. Krone, who is rarely at a loss for words, said through a frozen smile. A few minutes later, Mr. Krone, dressed impeccably in a bespoke suit, walked a reporter out of the office, and, referring to the president’s call, jocularly exclaimed, “I can’t believe that you know that story!”
Krone’s wife is Alyssa Mastromonaco, former Deputy Chief Of Staff for Operations at the White House:
photo of AM I found on Italian wikipedia.
One day, congressional leaders went to the White House to meet with the president. As they entered, Secret Service agents decided to screen staff members, who usually roll right onto the grounds with their bosses. According to a person familiar with the day’s events, Mr. Krone, incredulous, began shouting. He then called Ms. Mastromonaco, then his fiancée and the administration’s deputy chief of staff for operations, who arrived and apologized. (Mr. Krone said he did not recall the incident and suggested that he might have been misunderstood. “I have a sarcastic sense of humor,” he said.)
Adding to the tumult as the staff members and congressional leaders waited in the White House lobby, Mr. Boehner approached Mr. Reid and, upset by Mr. Reid’s attacks on him on the Senate floor, told him to “go [expletive] yourself.” Mr. Reid replied that he read only what Mr. Krone put in his speeches.
“He says, ‘Blame David,’ ” Mr. Krone recalled, chuckling. “And I was, like, ‘Don’t look at me!’ ”
There’s more weirdness. Apparently the President and First Lady threw a party in honor of Mr. Krone and Miss Mastromonaco’s upcoming wedding, and Krone didn’t go:
Even as his relationship with the administration deteriorated, Mr. Krone set a wedding date with Ms. Mastromonaco for last November. As the big day approached, Mr. Krone’s good friend George E. Norcross III, the Democratic political boss of South Jersey, suggested a golf outing at his Palm Beach, Fla., home before the nuptials. Mr. Krone said his fiancée endorsed the idea, but a week before the trip said, “Don’t get mad, but they are throwing a party for us.” The “they” in question was Mr. Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, but Mr. Krone kept his engagement with Mr. Norcross instead. “I’m exactly where I wanted,” he recalled thinking during the Florida trip.
At the White House engagement party, the president spoke of Ms. Mastromonaco’s indispensability and referred to her as a “little sister.” Michelle Obama declared her to be like “part of my family.” The absent groom later admired a photo of the cake served at the party, describing it as “like taller than me.”
(Pete Souza/The White House)
Mastromonaco now works at VICE. Reid, talking about Krone:
Mr. Reid fought back tears as he recalled the time he visited his wife, who had been injured in a car accident, and saw Mr. Krone at her hospital bedside. “David is someone I can say, and it doesn’t affect my manhood at all,” Mr. Reid said, “I love David Krone.”
This Times article has some unusually casual phrasing. For example:
It is hard to imagine now, but Mr. Krone used to have a good relationship with the White House. Smart and insanely hard-working, Mr. Krone, with his direct manner and total empowerment by Mr. Reid, proved a valuable ally in the administration’s early policy lifts.
Anyway: Peggy Noonan is disgusted with all this. She goes on to invoke The West Wing, on which she briefly worked:
The second thing the Horowitz story made me think of is this. I have remarked, and I think others have also, on the broad, deep impact of the television drama “The West Wing.” It spawned a generation of Washington-based television dramas. (Interestingly, they have become increasingly dark.) It also inspired a generation of young people to go to Washington and work in politics. I always thought the show gave young people a sense of the excitement of work, of being a professional and of being part of something that could make things better.
But it also gave them a sense of how things are done in Washington. And here the show’s impact was not entirely beneficial, because people do not—should not—relate to each other in Washington as they do on TV. “The West Wing” was a television show—it was show business—and it had to conform to the rules of drama and entertainment, building tension and inventing situations that wouldn’t really happen in real life.
Once when I briefly worked on the show, there was a scene in which the press secretary confronts the president and tells him off about some issue. Then she turned her back and walked out. I wrote a note to the creator, Aaron Sorkin, and said, Aaron, press secretaries don’t upbraid presidents in this way, and they don’t punctuate their point by turning their backs and storming out. I cannot remember his reply, but it was probably along the lines of, “In TV they do!”
“The West Wing” was so groundbreaking, and had in so many ways such a benign impact. But I wonder if it didn’t give an entire generation the impression that how you do it on a TV drama is how you do it in real life.
And so the president calls the senator and the aide listens in and cuts the president off. And things in Washington are more like a novel than life, but a cheap novel, and more like a TV show than life, but a poor and increasingly dark one.
Over at Gawker they love to call Peggy Noonan things like “doddering” and “an 800 year-old broken record” and “lunatic.” That is not helpful. It only reveals Gawker to be dummies who think they’re smarter than they are, Peggy Noonan is 10x more skillful at writing than anyone at Gawker.
She’s so good at writing/rhetoric/storytelling that she can slick you by assumptions that might not hold up. Here, in this same blog post, she tells the story of hearing of Monica Lewinsky:
At this point I said, “Whoa. Whoa.” Because my instinct was that it wasn’t true, presidents don’t do things like that, this sounds more like a novel than life. Maybe the girl is just someone with an extremely odd and active fantasy life.
But my friends believed the story, and I could tell that they felt a little sorry for me that I didn’t get it.
Which I didn’t. Because no president would act like that. It took days and weeks for me to fully absorb it. And then I got mad, because the people involved in the scandal were acting as vandals and tearing down things it took centuries to build.
My only personal experience of the White House was of two men, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, for whom such behavior would have been impossible.
If you work for American presidents who are good men, you will inevitably carry forward in your head the assumption that American presidents will be good men. Your expectations will be toward high personal standards and normality. If you started out working for leaders who are not good men, on the other hand, you can go forward with a cynicism and suspicion that are perhaps more appropriate to your era.
Well sure maybe they weren’t getting bjers but Reagan almost certainly was demented and both of them either didn’t know or lied about knowing how military officers in their White House were selling weapons to Islamist revolutionaries and using the money to fund right-wing murderers in Central America.
Maybe that’s worse?
That thing about tearing down things it took centuries to build, tho. I’m with her on that.
Thinking as I go here but: it’s cool and hip and really important sometimes to be “disruptive.”
But: perhaps in my dottage I’m becoming a grumpy old crank, but:
There’s also wisdom in a lower-c “conservative” respect and protective instinct for “things” it took centuries and great sacrifice to build. Things that preserve important, maybe even eternal values. Things like the American Presidency, which has a dignity earned for it by brilliant, inspired men, starting with George Washington, and yeah he owned slaves and that is extremely fucked as even he seems to have known but his greatness is undeniable because he was, seemingly at all times, thinking of something bigger than himself, offering his life to a larger vision that extends all the way to us and beyond.
Among the people that followed George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in that office there was not one who wasn’t deeply weird and full of puzzle and contradiction. There was at least one wicked criminal who deserved to be dumped in an open sewage canal. But taken together they built up and left behind a legacy, a “thing” of brilliance and endurance and dignity and honor and pride that benefits us, protects us, improves and broadens and enriches our lives. That deserves some kind of deep reverence.
Not worshipful reverence, not fanatical reverence. Even Reid knows he’s supposed to remember Twain too. Maybe reverence is the wrong word even. Maybe what it should inspire is humility.
That’s what’s missing here. A guy who interrupts the President and then brags about it to The New York Times isn’t being humble. He’s being an asshole.
Conversations With Kennedy
Posted: November 21, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, Kennedy-Nixon Leave a comment
Ben Bradlee, then a reporter for Newsweek, and John Kennedy, senator and then president, were good pals. Their wives, Toni and Jackie, were pals as well. This book is full of incredible detail. The night of the 1960 West Virginia primary, Kennedy and Bradlee go to a DC movie theater and see a porn:
This wasn’t the hard-core porn of the seventies, just a nasty little thing called Private Property, starring one Katie Manx as a horny housewife who kept getting raped and seduced by hoodlums. We wondered aloud if the movie was on the Catholic index of forbidden films (it was) and whether or not there were any votes in it either way for Kennedy in allegedly anti-Catholic West Virginia if it were known that he was in attendance. Kennedy’s concentration was absolute zero, as he left every twenty minutes to call Bobby in West Virginia. Each time he returned, he’d whisper “Nothing definite yet,” slouch back into his seat and flick his teeth with the fingernail of the middle finger on his right hand, until he left to call again.
[regrettably a newer actress, “Catie Minx,” makes further research here come to a circuitous end.]
How much did JFK drink?
Normally he sipped at a scotch and water without ice, rarely finishing two before dinner, sipped at a glass of wine during dinner, rarely had a drink after dinner, and he almost never had a drink in the middle of the day.
says an impressed Bradlee. From a footnote:
Kennedy was justly proud of the uncanny ability of the White House telephone operators to find anyone, anywhere, at any time of the day or night. Once, he dared Tony and Jackie and me to come up with a name of someone the operators couldn’t find. Jackie suggested Truman Capote, because he had an unlisted telephone number. Kennedy picked up the telephone and said only “Yes, this is the president. Would you please get me Truman Capote?” – no other identification. Thirty minutes later, Capote was on the line… not from his own unlisted number in Brooklyn Heights, but at the home of a friend in Palm Springs, Calif., who also had an unlisted number.
A recurring theme:
Philosophically, Kennedy worried out loud about the widening gap between the people who can discuss the complicated issues of today with intelligence and knowledge, and those he later referred to as “the conservative community.” It is a theme that fascinates him, and one to which he returns time and time again: a kind of Dialogue of the Deaf, growing and disturbing, between the comparative handful of people truly knowledgeable about the increasingly complex issues our our society, and the great majority who just don’t understand these issues and hide their lack of understanding behind old cliches. (He made an important speech on this subject at Yale University. It was never far from his thoughts.)
How much did JFK swear?:
Jackie’s question, “What is a Charlie-Uncle-Nan-Tare, for heaven’s sake?” [re: reporter Dick Wilson] went unanswered. (Kennedy’s earthy language was a direct result of his experience in the service, as it was for so many men of his generation, whose first serious job was war. Often it had direct Navy roots, as above when he used the signalman’s alphabet. He used “prick” and “fuck” and “nuts” and “bastard” and “son of a bitch” with an ease and comfort that belied his upbringing, and somehow it never seemed offensive, or at least it never seemed offensive to me.)
May 29, 1963, the President’s birthday party, a cruise on the yacht Sequoia down the Potomac:
Kennedy has not gotten the word that the “twist” is passe; any time the band played any other music for more than a few minutes, he passed the word along for more Chubby Checkers [sic]. he was also passing the word all night to the Sequoia’s captain. Apparently through an abundance of caution in case he wasn’t having a good time, Kennedy had ordered the skipper of the Sequoia to bring her back to the dock at 10:30 PM, only to be ordered back out “to sea” – which meant four or five miles down the Potomac. This happened no less than four times. Four times we moored and four times we unmoored. The weather was dreadful most of the evening, as one thunderstorm chased us up and down the river all night, and everyone was more or less drenched. Teddy was the wettest, and on top of everything mysteriously lost one leg of his trousers some time during the night.
September 12, 1963, Kennedy in Newport:
The president arrived thirteen minutes late, timidly carrying a felt hat. I had never seen him wear a hat, but he told us “I’ve got to carry one for a while… they tell me I’m killing the industry.”
November 23, 1963:
The sledgehammer news that President Kennedy had been shot came to me while I was browsing through Brentano’s bookstore on my lunch hour.
Six months earlier, over dinner at the White House:
It’s so hard to answer the question, “What’s he like?” about anyone interesting, with all the contradictions in all of us. “That’s what makes journalism so fascinating,” the president commented, “and biography so interesting… the struggle to answer that single question, “What’s he like?”
Is it OK to love Serial?
Posted: November 20, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Last week I was driving around the Pacific Northwest.
To pass the time I listened to seven episodes of Serial, the podcast where Sarah Koenig and her team investigate a murder that occurred in 1999 in Baltimore County.
It’s incredibly well-done storytelling. Compelling, entertaining, and now wildly popular. Serial is fun.
But is it ok?
As with all things there’s a backlash. I read this attack, which comes at Sarah for “white privilege,” and it didn’t ring valid at all to me (but then again I ate white privilege mixed in with my chocolate chip pancakes every Saturday morning as a kid).
I can’t get involved in whether this is really Hae’s brother, so let’s forget about that too.
What I’d say makes me a little queasy is the tone. Is it ok to have a great, fun listen as the kids play Nancy Drew about a teenage girl who was strangled and left in the park?
All across American media we turn murders into entertainment. Is this one any worse?
How many murders are depicted on TV in America in a year? A thousand?
I truly dunno. But Serial did make me think of this long, deeply sad article by Eric Schlosser, author of the incredible Fast Food Nation, which is about what happens to the family of a person who gets murdered.
If you like Serial, I give my highest recommendation to Popular Crime: Reflections On The Celebration Of Violence by Bill James. Maybe my favorite book read in the last five years.
Anyway, I was glad to have Serial as I drove around.
Maybe you guys both need to chill?
Posted: November 12, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Reading Nathan Heller on Stephen Pinker:
American language digests everything, in all directions. (Few other tongues would let you seize a bottle of whisky with chutzpah, drink it with louche abandon, and get down with the party.) And it’s given rise to special innovations. Consider the extra grammatical “aspects” of African-American English, the “be” aspects conveying habitual states, which add descriptive precision and nuance. (Eddie Murphy: “Elvis was forty-two years old, remember, right before he croaked?… His butt be sticking out.”) Problems arise only when vernaculars don’t intersect—when, say, the West Coast twentysomething asks her Bostonian boss to bring “hella” doughnuts to the meeting.
I don’t understand that Eddie Murphy joke. What would happen if you ask edyour Boston boss for hella doughnuts? If he’s cool he’d probably think it was funny . But, even if you’re on the West Coast you probably shouldn’t ask your boss to bring hella doughnuts to a meeting. (If you’re from the West Coast wouldn’t you call them donuts anyway?)
If you’re gonna take a run at Steven Pinker you better come correct.
Just learn how to diagram sentences and then relax, I say.
Crazy detail from this Washington Post story
Posted: November 5, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentCREDIT: REUTERS/ERIC THAYER
Minutes after landing at Reagan National Airport one day early this year, many GOP Senate hopefuls found themselves besieged at baggage claim by people with cameras yelling questions at them about abortion and rape.
This was no impromptu news conference but rather Republican staffers in disguise, trying to shock the candidates into realizing the intensity of what lay before them.
Cute, they’re role-playing!
The names of these organizations:
Party honchos tapped former Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades and star operatives Joe Pounder and Tim Miller to start America Rising, a group dedicated to digging up damaging information on Democrats.
Vote All You Want
Posted: November 4, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
If you live in LA County, here are some endorsements based on a very casual roundup from smart people. I have not looked into all this myself but this may be slightly better than voting at random:
Sheila Kuehl for supervisor.
No on 46.
Yes to all judicial reappointments
Dayan Mathai for judge.
1) Interested by this article in The Boston Globe entitled “Vote All You Want. The Secret Government Won’t Change.”
IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?
GLENNON:I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. And the documented evidence in the book is substantial—there are 800 footnotes in the book.
IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?
GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision….Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.
The presidency itself is not a top-down institution, as many people in the public believe, headed by a president who gives orders and causes the bureaucracy to click its heels and salute. National security policy actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy. Many of the more controversial policies, from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors to the NSA surveillance program, originated within the bureaucracy. John Kerry was not exaggerating when he said that some of those programs are “on autopilot.”
No surprise here to readers of The Wise Men.
2)
Enjoyed reading this Michael Kelly profile of David Gergen from 1993.
A speech-department staff member culled dozens of anecdotes about Nixon from intimates and aides in a lengthy report, with each anecdote indexed according to the character trait it was meant to advertise: Repartee, Courage, Kindness, Strength in Adversity. What is most painfully obvious about these undertakings is how little the anecdotalists had to work with. Exemplifying the President’s talent for Repartee was an account of Nixon silencing a New York businessman who had upbraided him over the Vietnam War by telling the man not to “give me any crap.” Illustrating the President’s Strength in Adversity was a bald little story of how the young Congressman Nixon, falling on an icy sidewalk, still managed to keep his 2-year-old daughter, Tricia, safe in his arms.
In this perfectionist and paranoid atmosphere, Gergen learned the bones of his craft.
He learned the importance of saying the same thing, over and over and over: “Nixon taught us about the art of repetition. He used to tell me, ‘About the time you are writing a line that you have written it so often that you want to throw up, that is the first time the American people will hear it.’ ”
He learned about the gimmicks of phrasing calculated to catch the public ear: “Haldeman used to say that the vast majority of words that issue under a President’s name are just eminently forgettable. What you need to focus on is what’s the line that is going to have a little grab to it.”
He learned the theory of controlled access. If you gave the press only a smidgen of Presidential sight and sound on a given day, reporters would be forced to make their stories out of that smidgen: “Nixon used to go into the press room with a statement that was only 100 words long because he did not want them editing him. He knew if he gave them more than 100 words, they’d pick and choose what to use.”
He learned the endless discipline required to protect the image, which was as evanescent as morning mist: “It went into everything — the speeches, the talking points, the appearances. Haldeman had a rule on appearances: if you wanted to put in a scheduling request for anything the President was going to do in public, your request had to fulfill what we called H.P.L. — Headline, Picture, Lede. You had to say, in writing, what the headline out of the event was going to be, what the lede was going to be and what the picture was going to be.”
And this:
Then, on Jan. 21, 1980, Bush unexpectedly won the Iowa Republican caucus and became the instant front-runner. “The very next day, Gergen called up Baker and said, miracle of miracles, he had managed to clear his schedule and would be able to take the job after all,” Keene says. “When Baker said the job was filled, Gergen came in as a volunteer speech writer.” In the month between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, when Bush was the leading Republican candidate, Gergen, according to Keene, “was very visible.”
But on Feb. 26, Bush lost the New Hampshire primary to a resurgent Ronald Reagan. “And Gergen just disappeared completely, I mean right away,” recalls Peter Teeley, Bush’s press secretary at the time. “We never heard from him again until he turned up with Reagan at the Republican convention.”
Even the Reaganites, who benefited from Gergen’s leap, were appalled by the speed of it. “He came to us as soon as it began to seem Bush was going to lose, definitely before Bush pulled out, and quite frankly this made us very suspicious of him,” recalls a former Reagan campaign official. “I mean, there’s jumping ship and there’s jumping ship. This guy was elbowing the women and children aside to get overboard.”
Gergen strongly denies that he showed any undue haste in switching allegiances. “It is not true that I disappeared in the campaign,” he says. “I continued to advise Bush much in the same way I had up to the point he was nominated Vice President.”
Let me note here (as I have elsewhere) that I took a class with David Gergen at the K School. I found him to be a serious but approachable and warm dude, always engaged and present. He did have a habit of ostentatiously taking notes during any guest speaker’s talk, but I took that to be a form of politeness.
I recall him telling a story – it’s possible I read this somewhere but I think I heard him say it – that he had a meeting with Nixon when he was (I believe) leaving law school and about to go into the Navy. Nixon advised him to serve as a regular old line officer on a ship, and not to use his law degree to get into a headquarters job.
Boston Marathon bomber’s friends
Posted: November 3, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945, Boston, New England Leave a commentA courtroom sketch of Dias Kadyrbayev, who pleaded guilty on Thursday. (Jane Flavell Collins / Associated Press)
On a recent visit home to Massachusetts I was surprised to learn about this story, which I hadn’t been following. After they learned that their friend Dzhokhar Tsarnaev probably did the Boston Marathon bombing, several associates went to his room and rounded up some of his stuff and threw it out.
The New Yorker tells the story with all kinds of vivid details.
The three of them went to Taco Bell, then to Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev’s apartment, where Kadyrbayev’s girlfriend, Bayan Kumiskali, was about halfway through watching “The Pursuit of Happyness.” Everyone but Tazhayakov got stoned, then they all sat on the couch and watched the second half of the movie, checking for news on their devices.
Can’t help but feel for Azamat Tazhavakov, “who was known as a mama’s boy, even though he was thousands of miles away from home.”
When Tazhayakov awoke early the next morning, he discovered that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was still on the loose, had now been publicly identified as a suspect in the bombing, and that Tamerlan had been killed. Tazhayakov began to panic and smoked marijuana for what may have been the first time in his life.
A VERY bad decision.
Politics roundup
Posted: November 2, 2014 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
1) Could anyone reasonably say that this statement is not true:
The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.
That comment appears the biggest issue in Louisiana’s senate race. MSNBC goes ahead and calls the comment “controversial,” which I guess is “true,” there is a “controversy” about it now, but what a weasel of a word. As always, important to see the comments in context. MSNBC again:
It’s important to emphasize that Landrieu, speaking to NBC’s Chuck Todd, went beyond identity politics. “One of the reasons that the president’s so unpopular is because he put the moratorium on off-shore drilling. remember?” she added. “After Macondo. And our state was furious about that. Now he could have shut down the BP operations but he didn’t, he shut down the whole Gulf. When you shut down the whole Gulf of Mexico it puts a lot of people here at risk and out of business. That’s number one.”
“She’s basically calling the people of Louisiana, she’s calling all of us in the South racist,” Jindal said, demanding an apology. “Here in Louisiana and across the South, we don’t think in terms of black and white, in terms of racial colors — the only colors that matter down here are red, white and blue and … purple and gold as we cheer our LSU Tigers onto victory in college football. It’s not about race.”
2)
(Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
Granting rare “Must Read” status to this post by the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson about Jeb Bush.
“Several of our boys were pallbearers—maybe all of them—but the one I remember is Jeb,” Barbara Bush wrote in an account, in her memoirs, of her father-in-law’s funeral. Jeb was her second son:
He was a student at the University of Texas, nineteen years old, six feet four inches tall. Remember, this was the early 1970′s. He, of course, did not have a dark suit. He told me not to worry—he’d borrowed one. I should have kept worrying. It was black corduroy. He is the most handsome man (at least according to his mother) and that saved him. Otherwise, he would have looked like a card shark from Las Vegas.
It is a quintessential Bush family moment: an establishment premise streaked with clumsy absurdity, with the participants mysteriously pleased about how it all looks—convinced that their fine qualities have saved them. This was October, 1972, during a period in which Jeb’s older brother, George W. Bush, was in something of a Vegas-card-shark phase. Their grandfather, Prescott Bush, who was being buried that day, had been a banker and Connecticut Senator; their father, George H. W. Bush, had made a good deal of money in the oil business and was serving as Ambassador to the United Nations. George W. had just been rejected by the University of Texas Law School and was drinking too much in all the wrong places, including behind the wheel of a car—maybe best not to remember that. The Bushes have always thought, to an extent that can, frankly, be puzzling for anyone who simply watches his speeches or assesses his record, that Jeb was their child of destiny. When Barbara Bush’s memoir came out, in 1994, after her husband’s one-term Presidency, the family thought that Jeb, not George, would be the next President Bush. The Bushes have never hidden their surprise that it didn’t work out that way, and now, according to multiple press reports, they have again become worked up about the idea that the man in the black corduroy suit can make it to the White House. But why should he?
Felt refreshing to read someone raise the idea “why should Jeb Bush be president?” without assuming I concede he’s the most terrific American around.
3) I’m afraid I also have to grant “Must Read” status to this depressing article:
Hard-Nosed Advice From Veteran Lobbyist: ‘Win Ugly or Lose Pretty’
Richard Berman Energy Industry Talk Secretly Taped…
Mr. Berman offered several pointers from his playbook.
“If you want a video to go viral, have kids or animals,” he said, and then he showed a spot his company had prepared using schoolchildren as participants in a mock union election — to suggest that union bosses do not have real elections.
“Use humor to minimize or marginalize the people on the other side,” he added.
“There is nothing the public likes more than tearing down celebrities and playing up the hypocrisy angle,” his colleague Mr. Hubbard said, citing billboard advertisements planned for Pennsylvania that featured Robert Redford. “Demands green living,” they read. “Flies on private jets.”
Mr. Hubbard also discussed how he had done detailed research on the personal histories of members of the boards of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to try to find information that could be used to embarrass them.
I guess Richard Berman would have to admire whoever recorded the talk for their “win ugly” strategy. Although it was recorded by an energy executive:
What Mr. Berman did not know — and what could now complicate his task of marginalizing environmental groups that want to impose limits on fracking — is that one of the energy industry executives recorded his remarks and was offended by them.
“That you have to play dirty to win,” said the executive, who provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to The New York Times under the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It just left a bad taste in my mouth.”
What does Berman suggest you do to people operating out of principle?
4) Not granting this full “Must Read” status but it is interesting. Iowa Senate candidate and proud hog-castrater Joni Ernst was recorded talking about Obamacare. Here’s what she said.
“We’re looking at Obamacare right now. Once we start with those benefits in January, how are we going to get people off of those? It’s exponentially harder to remove people once they’ve already been on those programs…we rely on government for absolutely everything. And in the years since I was a small girl up until now into my adulthood with children of my own, we have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it. But we have gotten away from that. Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything.”
I don’t think this is as crazy an opinion as Jonathan Chait seems to. I bet a lot of Americans would agree with this. If Joni Ernst believes this, that churches and private organizations should provide things like health care, and the government should just stay out of it, she should say that and argue it. I would however agree with Chait and John Le Carre.
That’s the fundamental belief that motivates most, if not all, the conservative opposition: Health care should be a privilege rather than a right. If you can’t afford health insurance on your own, that is not the government’s problem.
I happen to find this belief morally bizarre. People who cannot afford their own insurance either don’t earn much money, or have health risks, or family members with health risks, too expensive to bear.
All of us non-socialists would agree that there ought to be some things rich people get to enjoy that poor people are deprived of. Access to health care is a strange choice of things to deprive the losers of — not least because one of the things you do to “earn” the ability to afford it is not just the normal market value of earning or inheriting a good income, but the usually random value of avoiding serious illness or accident.
Indeed, very few Republicans have the confidence to make the case openly that the inability of some people to afford the cost of their own medical care is their own problem. But that is the belief that sets them apart from major conservative parties across the world, and it is the belief that explains why they have opposed national health insurance every time Democrats have held power, and why they have neglected to create national health insurance every time they have.
Anyway, there are honorable people in politics. If you live in Arkansas’ District 35, let me give my personal endorsement to Clarke Tucker for State Representative. Wish I could vote for him!
Helytimes 
