Going to read Soros's new book (0.00 / 0)

He's a bit obtuse in his writing but I think he understands what's going on better than anyone (and he made $1 billion last year betting against the subprime so he puts his money where his mouth is)

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by: roberto_jordan @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 14:29:02 PM UTC

Nixonland (0.00 / 0)

I've just started reading it and, boy, is it bringing back memories.  In my youth I hated HATED Nixon, but a lot of how delicious it was to hate him had been forgotten.  I have to thank Rick Pearlstein for reminding me of some of the more subtle pleasures I got from hating Nixon -- his clumsiness, his goofiness, the lack of any grace whatsoever.  The comic self-pity.  His letter to his mother from the point of view of a loyal dog. Reading it is indeed a pleasure.

Just finished Orville Vernon Burton's "The Age of Lincoln", which covers the lead up to the Civil War and then Reconstruction and the death of Reconstruction, ending in about 1910.  A fascinating view of Lincoln's idea of freedom and democracy and how that was subverted and destroyed in the years after the Civil War.  Northern capitalists developed the Southern planters' idea of an aristocracy and a nation of independent agricultural yeomen became enslaved by the Railroads and the factory system.  

The parts about how Klan terror disenfranchised black people and the genocide of the plains Indians were hard to read.  To think that the 14th Amendment had made Indians American citizens and at the same time states had bounties on Indian scalps is particularly disturbing.  All in all an unexpectedly thoughtful and thought provoking read.

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by: kaleidescope @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 14:30:44 PM UTC

Reconstruction (0.00 / 0)

I listened to the CD-audio of the Age of Lincoln, and it was quite good. Speaking of the era after Lincoln, there have been several books recently published dealing with Reconstruction in general, and at least two on the Colfax Massacre specifically. It is difficult reading but nevertheless necessary reading in my view as the era of Reconstruction, and the anti-Black violence that was allowed to thrive throughout and after it, remains a misunderstood period. I for one didn't know anything about it. The failure to rise above the "truthiness" constructed after the Civil War, to prematurely rehabilitate the South has contributed to the failure to call reality by its right name today.  

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by: Bulworth @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 14:40:09 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Nixonland (0.00 / 0)

You must be putting the rest of your life on hold to be so far along in Nixonland, which is like 5,000 pages long.

I went to Perlstein's book signing here in DC on Tuesday and got my copy. Considered waiting for the paper-back, but oh well.  

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by: Bulworth @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 14:33:10 PM UTC

Me, I LOVE Chaos. It's Another Word For Democracy, Progress (0.00 / 0)

Of course, I WOULD say that, since I was a teenager at the time, and chaos sort of comes with that territory.

But the 50s were dullsville, stiffling, even for the newly-minted white middle class.  As long as blacks were successfully being terrorized into silence and obedience, and women were seen, but not heard, everything was fine.  That's was "democracy" for the elites.  The 1960s was democracy for the rest of us.  And that's a division that remains to this day.  Richard Pildes wrote an essay, "Democracy and Disorder", in The Vote: Bush, Gore, and the Supreme Court, showing that those who voted to seat Bush shared a history of voting against  participatory democracy in a broad range of forms.  It's the same division, translated into constitutional language.

In short, I understand what Nixon was appealing to.  But I see it from the point of view of all the injustice it offloaded onto other people.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 15:14:30 PM UTC

I recently read Predictably Irrational (0.00 / 0)

It confirmed my belief that a progressive society has to be formulated so that it doesn't depend upon the creation and maintenance of a rational, deliberative democracy.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 15:37:50 PM UTC

X saves the world (0.00 / 0)

More pop sociology than politics. Totally entertaining.  

end the blurring--vote steve novick for u.s. senate in oregon

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by: petrichor @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 15:46:44 PM UTC

reading (0.00 / 0)

in the middle of "Right is Wrong" by A. Huffington

almost finished with "Spud" by van de Ruit - young adult fiction is an amazing genre

about to start "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" by A. Lamott

**totally off topic**

My husband started his going out of business sale yesterday.  The closing of an independent hardware store in rural, small town America is surreal.  He had a huge line before opening and basically gridlocked main street all morning.  

In these economic times, things are a changin.  It makes me sick in the stomach to think how many peoples lives are changing for the worse.  Fortunately for us we choose the DFH route awhle ago - we will have no credit card, car, or house debt.  So we will be fine.  But the reality for a lot of folks in America is so grim.  Ugh.

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by: sisterfish @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 16:08:15 PM UTC

Living debt-free makes one a Hippy? (0.00 / 0)

My wife will be interested to know that - she's convinced me that it makes us conservative.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 17:31:57 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

different motive, same result (0.00 / 0)

we decided the best way we could say f-you to the status quo, consumerism, traditional American family construct was through something tangible - our money.  It was smart fiscally and it felt empowering.  Our next goal is to build our own green, sustainable house with greenhouse.

No matter what the motivation, it feels great not to be in debt to anyone!

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by: sisterfish @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 19:30:25 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Our motives don't seem much different (4.00 / 1)

My comment was an attempt at humor and to suggest that the concept of "fiscal responsibility" (for lack of a better term) is not really an issue to which either the right, or the left can lay claim.

Good luck with the "green" house.  We're a few years away from that kind of thing. Living in a city makes it more difficult, I think, but not impossible. We've managed to reform our eating habits over the last couple of years to support local producers and organic products.  The locally produced part is tough in the middle of a harsh Minnesotan winter, especially from the fruit and vegetable perspective, by we try.

Next task: Electric cars.  My dream is to put a solar panel on the garage roof, and never pump gas again.  Such would require us to abandon our debt-free existence, however.

Have a great weekend.

"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 19:52:07 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I will have to rad Nixonland, but 'Chaos' was the bad thing? (4.00 / 1)

I dont know what to think, but Nixon tried to steal democracy, set himself above the Constitution and the people. The excuses given about social chaos was spurrious at the time, and the "Love it or Leave it" false patriotism scheme was no different than it is today, it had credence as the war protests began, and became less so as the war dragged on.

The story of the sixties is hidden history. Freedom riders, folk music, antiwar protests, right-wing Democrats and progressives, liberation theology and murdering Bishop Romero, the mass graves of nuns, Mai Lai, agent orange, the Panthers, the Chicago Eight, drugs, free love and Woodstock, the Beatles and the Stones. There is so much story in the history, and the people who have been telling these stories are in the large part, happy to hide the gestalt of the times.

I am a little shocked that that book can read and one comes away with "the riots, the anger, the violence, the desperate need for some sort of control." Because even at the time, it was known that instigators and agent provocateurs were driving it.

It is still going on to this day. If Anti Iraq war protests were of any size, Republicans would be building concentration camps and jails all over America, enough to hold hundreds of thousands of people. The right to a trial would be slipping away and habeas corpus would be threatened and ordinary citizens would be labeled terrorists.

Oh wait.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

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by: HousesofProgress @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 16:46:04 PM UTC

It wasn't as chaotic as all that....a bit unruly (0.00 / 0)

but that's what Democracy is during an unpopular war and popular uprisings. But chaotic at the fringes perhaps. And yes, I came of age in the 60's and 70's. It was not that "scary". Well, maybe to the old order based upon militarism and segregation because the "times they were achangin"

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by: IndySteve @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 17:21:57 PM UTC

I Think The Point Is (0.00 / 0)

that some of the folks who seemed at the time to be rather reactionary were actually just more shocked and bewildered than anything else.

If Robert Kennedy had lived, and been elected President (as he surely would have), then we would have a very different history of that era, as one of the things he did best was interpret the struggles of the day in terms that drew people together.  He was remarkable in being able to appeal to Wallace voters as well as hippies and civil rights workers.  He could acknowledge the chaos, and the people who saw little more than it, and then move on to connect that chaos to a larger picture.

Nixon, of course, did the exact opposite.  He did everything possible to foment chaos and division, while mouthing plattitudes about the exact opposite.  Thus, the chaotic aspect, which was a relatively superficial read, came to become an essential aspect, precisely because that's what Nixonian politics was all about--the obsession over small effects as a means for obscuring large causes.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 22:39:20 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

This Republic of Suffering (4.00 / 1)

Actually has a Memorial Day theme. I may have to go out and buy Nixonland because my parents don't have to buy it: they lived through it. My Mom's line about Nixon is: "The country got what they deserved but I was stuck with him too".  

Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, and lightness has a call that's hard to hear.  

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by: 4jkb4ia @ Fri May 23, 2008 at 22:34:55 PM UTC

Doesn't anyone read mindless drivel? (0.00 / 0)

Jeez...you guys are never off the clock.

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by: Susan S @ Sat May 24, 2008 at 01:14:32 AM UTC