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| 1469618052
| 9781469618050
| 1469618052
| 4.24
| 68
| Feb 1997
| Sep 02, 2014
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it was amazing
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26,000 YEARS There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wra 26,000 YEARS There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell, also written with white-hot intensity; and I also read Manning Marable’s exhaustive terrific biography of Malcolm X. This excellent book fits perfectly together with those three, another piece in the difficult jigsaw puzzle of America in the 20th century. The story of Elijah Muhammed is the story of the Nation of Islam. He was the supreme leader from 1934 to 1975 . In these early years, everything the NOI did, everything it believed, was a reaction to the profound racism black people experienced every day – just to mention one statistic, from a peak of 161 lynchings in 1892, there were still 24 in 1933. Elijah Muhammed said that by the age of 20 he had witnessed three lynchings. He said : I’ve seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years So it is perhaps not surprising he preached a religion that condemned white people as devils and looked forward to the day when all black people could live lives in their own national homeland without any contact with white people. Sounds extreme, but the emotional logic is right there in front of your face. Muhammed called for a place in the Western hemisphere for African-Americans to establish an independent state. He admitted that the American government would probably not accede to this demand. IN THE BEGINNING WAS FARD The founder of the Nation of Islam was a very mysterious man named Wallace Fard Muhammed. They think he was born around 1877 and that in his life he used over 50 aliases. His first 50 years are obscure, then he arrived in Detroit in 1930 and over four years he created the movement known as the Nation of Islam, inventing its complicated and weird theology, renaming all his reportedly 8000 followers by X-ing out their slave names, and discovering his successor Elijah Muhammed; but then he got into some heavy trouble with the cops who told him to leave town and not come back in 1932. Two years later he vanished and no one since has ever turned up any information on what happened to him. You have to say it’s very impressive, starting up a new religion in three years with a complete radical ideology, one that still flourishes nearly 100 years later. [image] Fard Muhammed constructed an elaborate world history explaining how it came to be that once the black man (which he called the “original” man) ruled the earth and then the white man came along and enslaved him. Like, what happened? * The explanation he came up with sounded like science fiction – there was a renegade evil black scientist named Yacub who for murky rebellious reasons created by means of genetic experimentation a completely white race of people. (It’s way more complicated than that of course.) Professor Clegg tries so very hard to maintain a scholarly Wikipedialike neutral tone to his detailed exposition of the Nation’s beliefs, but he can’t refrain sometimes from comments such as this : The myth of Yacub’s creation of the white race and the murderous, deceitful and evil nature attributed to whites by the NOI has given it the distinction of being the most racially chauvinistic black organisation in the history of the United States… his [Fard’s] doctrines were a tragic variation of the ideas of Hitler, racist eugenicists, and other racial purists of his day…. To some, the Muslim history of the Black Nation made perfect sense and explained a great many things; to others it was sheer lunacy The author clearly states that this creation myth was a product of “the imagination of Fard Muhammed”. There was also an elaborate Judgement Day scenario in which the white race would be condemned and the black race saved by a giant spaceship called the Mother Plane. Professor Clegg says : Perhaps second only to the Yacub myth, the Mother Plane story was the most peculiar element of the theology of the Nation. Unless one was predisposed to believe in flying saucers, this tale could hardly be told without raising serious doubts even among the most open minded of listeners…. Another extremely bold element of Fard’s belief system was that Christianity was identified as the religion of the white devil and totally rejected. In Fard’s origin story Jesus was the second prophet sent by Allah after Moses, and he was a black man who built the city of Jerusalem and was killed by bounty hunters and was not crucified. The true teaching of Jesus was Islam but the white people falsified history. (The Pope was the head of that conspiracy.) The third prophet sent was Mohammed and then Allah much later saw that the black enslaved people in America needed a fourth prophet, and so sent Fard Muhammed. The point of this whole enterprise was to enable black people in America to regain their original culture, names, strength and intelligence, and rejoin the Tribe of Shabazz and prepare for the judgment of the white race which will surely come soon. ELIJAH He began life as Elijah Poole, seventh son of a sharecropper in a small town in Georgia in the year of 1897. He moved to Detroit, as thousands did, finally encountering Fard Muhammed’s group at the age of 34. He was converted and, for sure, although uneducated, and not a great orator, and a physically small man too, he must have had a quiet charisma, because in a short while Fard realised that it was Elijah who should lead the Nation when he departed the scene, in 1933/4. Elijah didn’t change much of what Fard taught except for one massive detail : he identified Fard as Allah himself (p123). That is, not a prophet from Allah, but Allah in person. Right there is why orthodox Muslims would reject the NOI teachings as blasphemous. But it took a long time for Elijah to get any grasp of what actual Islam preached, even though he used the Qu’ran all the time; and likewise it took a long time for orthodox Muslims to notice the Nation of Islam. When they did, neither wanted to fall out with the other, so most of the time they politely ignored a whole herd of elephants that were in every room. Occasionally there would be hotheads who would get mad at Elijah. One orthodox Muslim quoted by a Chicago newspaper “denounced Muhammed as a fraud and a convicted criminal who taught racial hatred contrary to the true teachings of Islam”. But mostly the heat that Elijah brought down was from the usual cops and FBI and hostile press, and that was because the fiery speechifying and the disciplined strength of the Nation of Islam made them all nervous. QUIET RADICALISM They were consistent and firm : the black people of America have to do it for themselves, no one is going to help them. They therefore built slowly and painstakingly a string of businesses and told their followers to buy only from those where possible. They got tremendous respect, even, grudgingly, from white opponents. They were a refuge for a lot of people who had been living dissolute lives. ELIJAH MAKES A HAJJ This was a big turning point – in 1959 he toured Middle Eastern countries for the first time and performed the hajj. His travels confronted him with some unpalatable facts, such as In Saudi Arabia and the Holy City itself, African blacks were being legally held as slaves by Arab Muslims p124 At the same time, the Muslim clerics who met Elijah realised that he was preaching some strange belief system that wasn’t Islamic at all. This was awkward all round. BACK IN THE USA By now it was the Civil Rights era. Black people “who had risked life and limb” struggling for civil rights and desegregation looked on with horror as Elijah Muhammed made it clear in speech after speech that integration was wrong, the races should be physically separate, Christianity was a trick and any dealings with the US government in the form of voting or education were useless. All other African American leaders, like Martin Luther King, were “hungry for a place among the white race instead of their own race” and had ”turned many potential freedom-fighting Negroes into contented, docile slaves” p131. Not too many people slagged off Martin Luther King, but Elijah did. This thinking culminated in a horrible period of rapprochement between the Nation of Islam and two white groups, the American Nazi Party and – believe it or not – the KKK. Well, once again, the logic was plain to see – the white groups wanted total racial segregation and so did the Nation. It led to several NOI meetings being attended by the Nazis (in full regalia) or the Klan. Elijah was trying to figure whether they could work something out. In the end, they didn’t. MALCOLM X This is where the story gets positively Shakespearean – the doting loving father sees his favourite son betray him, but the favourite son believes in his heart he is rescuing his beloved father from tragic error. Malcolm came to the view that Elijah’s resolute rejection of any political involvement was a big mistake, and essentially, the NOI was not fighting for black people as it should but was waiting for some kind of divine intervention, which was not going to happen. Elijah stuck to his principles – no dealing with the (white) devil. Aside from that there was a lot of paranoia about who was going to succeed Elijah. It was complicated. Well, in 1965 as we know, Malcolm was assassinated, and although three NOI members were later convicted of the crime, Professor Clegg is less than clear, unusually, about whether any order was given by Elijah Muhammed. On the one hand, nothing major happened in the NOI without Elijah’s approval; on the other hand, it was completely out of character, he was not a leader who threatened people with violence. His hair-raising rhetoric was in complete contrast to his gentle demeanour. He was unusual. THIS REVIEW IS WAY TOO LONG It is a most fascinating story, that’s my excuse, and this book is a brilliant piece of original detailed research. Highly recommended. [image] *I was reminded of a more succinct story from Jomo Kenyatta. He said : “When the white man came here we had the land and he had the Bible. Then he taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, he had the land and we had the Bible.” ...more |
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Dec 20, 2023
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Dec 20, 2023
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| 1789542987
| 9781789542981
| 1789542987
| 4.20
| 381
| unknown
| Jul 07, 2022
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it was amazing
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Written with whitehot outrage that flashes forth on every page, this book is brilliant and exhausting. Gone With The Wind, the book and the film, is t Written with whitehot outrage that flashes forth on every page, this book is brilliant and exhausting. Gone With The Wind, the book and the film, is the beloved sunkissed window through which Sarah Churchwell directs our gaze – backwards to the Civil War and forwards to the attempted fascist putsch of 6 January 2021. All the dots are joined. SC says that GWTW is the most popular American story of all time. Wikipedia confirms it’s the highest grossing film ever, adjusted for inflation. The book still sells 300,000 copies a year. And it is all about people who hate the USA. In GWTW Abraham Lincoln is a villain. I never read the book – it’s not necessary. But I think you do need to have seen the film, to experience the power of the gorgeous blazing design, direction, cinematography, the dashing and extraordinary characters, and the narrative power. Altogether a sumptuous production, an angel cake injected with poison. I did feel that I needed a better grasp on the history of the postwar period (Reconstruction) – exactly what did the victorious North do or not do in the defeated South; exactly why did they, having fought a horrible war to free the slaves, then supinely or connivingly allow the Southern states to re-erect a new form of slavery-in-all-but-name, which goes under the name Jim Crow. This is a book about the fight to speak the truth about history. Sarah Churchwell pulls no punches in accusing the USA of wilful blindness about its past, of revelling in myths collected together under the name “Lost Cause”, for which GWTW is a brightly-lit shop window. I’ll give one longish example of how racist GWTW is and how the author deals with it : Like the rest of her circle, Scarlett is highly indignant at the Yankees for cracking down on the Ku Klux Klan, furious at the prospect of summary justice for members of an organisation created to inflict summary justice. “Suspected complicity in the Ku Klux Klan, or complaint by a negro that a white man had been uppity to him were enough to land a citizen in jail. Proof and evidence were not needed. The accusation was sufficient.” In reality, this is the exact system that pertained first to the enslaved, and then to the free Black people in the Jim Crow South. This grievance appears within pages of Rhett Butler’s admitting he murdered a Black man for being “uppity”, at which no one bats an eye… Instead, Scarlett believes that murdering Black men for being what white people consider uppity is generally the right thing to do: “Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a negro for being ‘uppity to a lady’”. Whatever defenses of Gone with the Wind one may entertain, the fact is that it regards murdering a Black man as evidence of Rhett’s residual morality. Rhett is redeemed by his willingness to act as judge, jury, and hangman, whereas the idea of anyone being imprisoned for lynching is an outrage to all the novel’s protagonists. So GWTW sells the idea that the war wasn’t about slavery, that the slaves were cheerful workers being tended lovingly by their careful masters who looked after them from cradle to grave, that the South was a gracious land of magnolia and cotton until the War of Northern Aggression and those nasty Yankees torched it all out of pure spite, vindictiveness and mercenary greed. SC is not so blinkered as to fail to notice the feminist aspects of GWTW, or the rueful humour strewn throughout, or the pace of the story, but these all pale before its successful attempt to whitewash Southern history. I would say that at just under 400 pages of dense text I might think it’s around 100 pages too long, but I would not be able to figure out which pages could be deleted. It’s one of those books – it has to be this intense and this wrathful. When the South Korean film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture, President Donald Trump asked a rally in Colorado : ‘What the hell was that all about? Can we get like Gone with the Wind back please?’ ...more |
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Mar 04, 2023
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Mar 24, 2023
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Dec 08, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1529379520
| 9781529379525
| 1529379520
| 4.02
| 247
| 2021
| Nov 11, 2021
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it was amazing
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A great read, hypnotically interesting, and hardly a single dull page in the whole 500. You skitter through the whole of American history through thes
A great read, hypnotically interesting, and hardly a single dull page in the whole 500. You skitter through the whole of American history through these 10 page biographies of all the presidents (up to and including Joe Biden) and it becomes really compelling, like a great novel, full of what-happened-next moments, and, of course, crammed full of astonishing characters, some vile, some weird, and some just wonderful. Because you are reading the story of one guy who was the previous president’s VP or deadly opponent, you get overlapping and repeating, echoing situations and events in the chapters before and after. When you read through the whole book, it creates a very pleasurable refracting effect, like seeing the same event simultaneously from three or four slightly different perspectives. Now, it must be said that there are a handful of dullard presidents who seem to have spent their years in the White House fretting about whether to buy more silver for the Treasury or not (this, mysteriously, could be quite controversial way back when). But mostly, events happened with exhausting rapidity to these 46 guys. Actually 45 guys, because Grover Cleveland gets counted twice. MOST EXTRAORDINARY STORY IN THE WHOLE BOOK Teddy Roosevelt finished his second term in 1909 but he was back campaigning for a third party (called the Bull Moose Party – don’t ask) in 1912. He was in Milwaukee leaving a hotel to make a big speech when he was shot at close range. The bullet penetrated TR’s thick overcoat, steel glasses case, and the manuscript of a fifty-page speech folded over twice, before lodging in his chest, a quarter of an inch from his heart. Roosevelt, on seeing that he was not coughing any blood, decided that the bullet had not penetrated his lungs and so decided to continue and give his speech before going to hospital. He spoke for eighty-four minutes, revealing his bloodstained shirt to the audience and telling them “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose” [image] This is the glasses case SOME RANDOM FACTOIDS, ANECDOTES AND QUOTES THAT JUMPED OFF THE PAGES FOR ME Three presidents were born after their father died, the last being Bill Clinton – i didn’t know that! Grover Cleveland was the only president to serve as a public executioner. Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to invite an African American to dine at the White House (Booker T Washington in September 1901). THE EXTRAORDINARY FECUNDITY OF JOHN TYLER [image] He has to be one of the more obscure presidents, but he has a crazy claim to fame. In two marriages he fathered 15 children, the last one being born when he was 70, in 1860. And at the time of writing [2021] his last surviving grandchild was still alive, 231 years after Tyler was born, a year after Washington was inaugurated. !!! THE REMARKABLE INAUGURATION OF CALVIN COOLIDGE On 2nd August 1923 Warren Harding died. That day his VP Coolidge was staying with his family in their house in Plymouth Notch, “a remote hamlet in Vermont”. The news was brought to Coolidge by telegram, since there was no phone in the house. Nor was there any electricity, so his father, a local notary, swore his son into office at 2:47 AM by the light of a kerosene lamp. (If it was in a movie you’d say – huh, the usual Hollywood romantic twaddle.) THE HORRIBLE TRAGEDY OF FRANKLIN PIERCE Children : Three : Franklin Junior (died in infancy), Frank Robert (died of typhus as the age of four), Benjamin (died in a train crash at the age of eleven). Just to compound the horror, in the train crash Benjamin was with his parents. They survived, he didn’t. After this Pierce was convinced that God was punishing him for something, and for this reason, he refused to use a Bible for his swearing-in. Pierce’s wife hated politics so much she didn’t attend his inauguration. ANDREW JACKSON ON WHETHER IT WAS RIGHT TO DRIVE NATIVE AMERICANS OFF THEIR LANDS What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms? SOME LINCOLN More that sixteen thousand books have been written about Lincoln his mastery of language was such that he could have made the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should forever be bound by a single post office sound like something out of Genesis He never directly identified himself as a Christian FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS : RUTHERFORD HAYES! [image] Hayes made very little impact on world affairs. The only thing he seems to have done is to arbitrate in a border dispute between Argentina and Paraguay. “This constitutes a rather thin international legacy.” A CATTY REMARK Chester Arthur was the closest thing to Jacqueline Kennedy that Washington would see until Jacqueline Kennedy A FINAL POINT FROM A BRITISH PERSON One thing that always stuck in my head was that I heard someone once on the radio saying that the American presidents look at the British prime ministers in total envy, because the prime ministers have way more power than the presidents. This same point is made on p 193 so I think it must be correct. (When we say power here, we mean over the country, not throughout the world.) It happens because the prime minister is only prime minister because he or she is leader of the party which has the majority in the House of Commons. Therefore any legislation they wish to put forward will get approved. Not so with the American president. He (so far always a he) is not head of his party, and his party may not and often doesn’t have a majority in the Senate. Logjams all around! Tears and gnashing of teeth in the Oval Office! What this means is that if the British majority party thinks that their prime minister/leader has gone mad, like Liz Truss recently did, they will throw them out immediately and get a new one. Alas, American parties can’t throw out mad presidents. IN CONCLUSION One of my books of the year. Totally recommended. ...more |
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Nov 21, 2022
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Nov 28, 2022
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Apr 02, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1594202664
| 9781594202667
| 1594202664
| 4.16
| 74,519
| Jan 05, 2010
| Oct 05, 2010
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really liked it
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This was a vast life and this is a vast book. You get to feel that every dinner GW ate is itemised and every outfit he ever wore is lovingly described
This was a vast life and this is a vast book. You get to feel that every dinner GW ate is itemised and every outfit he ever wore is lovingly described. There are long stretches of GW’s life during which he was a middling-prosperous gentleman farmer. These months and years get just as much attention as the revolution and the eight years of being the first president. Ron Chernow is unhurried. He will get to the various cataclysms in his own good time. Ron is at pains to tell us how unfair it is that GW has often been portrayed as a stuffed shirt pompous waxwork dummy but as some of these less dramatic years pass by with glacial speed, well, he doesn’t come across as the guy you would want to have a beer and a game of darts with. WHAT MADE HIM SO GREAT? He always, always looked the part - over six feet tall and strong as an ox. You may not think looking the part is such a big deal but this is emphasised over and again. And he was rock solid. There was never going to be a scandal involving George Washington. He made Americans look in the mirror and like what they saw. Ron says : His fortitude in keeping the impoverished Continental Army intact was a major historical accomplishment. It always stood on the brink of dissolution, and Washington was the one figure who kept it together, the spiritual and managerial genius of the whole enterprise… He was that rare general who was great between battles and not just during them And he became a living god to Americans when, having won the War of Independence, he retired gracefully back to his farm. They thought that was just amazing. By the way, a crucial point about the American Revolution is that it was The historical anomaly of a revolution inaugurated by affluent, conservative leaders GEORGE AT THE DENTIST On page 437 we gloomily read “in the eyes of posterity his dental problems rank among his best-known attributes”. On the following page we read that GW became a convert to “transplanted teeth” and “bought nine teeth in 1784 from certain nameless Negroes for thirteen shillings apiece” (approximately £80 or $110). Ron adds : Whether he wanted the teeth implanted directly in his mouth or incorporated into dentures, we cannot say. However ghoulish this trade sounds to modern readers, it was then standard practice for rich people to purchase teeth from the poor. [image] NO MORE AUCTION BLOCK One of the most interesting strands that run through this book is the terrible issue of slavery. Ron says Washington’s opposition to slavery took the form of a gradual awakening over many decades. Ron explains the common contradiction of many rich farmers including GW – they were opposed to the slave trade, but not opposed to owning slaves. (Modern readers may think that wasn’t a distinction worth making.) And if any slave ran away, they were of course most assiduous in recapturing him. Their attitude was – slaves were imposed on us by the evil British, we never asked for them, this is a terrible burden for us. But of course the idea of freeing the slaves was quite insane. Ron sums up GW’s contradictions : For all his rhetorical objections to slavery, Washington found it impossible to wean himself away from the income it produced. Habituated to profligate spending and a baronial lifestyle, he was in no position to act forcefully on his principled opposition to slavery until the very end of his life And He suffered from a conceptual blind spot about slavery, tending to regard it as a fair economic exchange : he clothed and fed his workers, and “in return, I expect such labor as they ought to render”. He could never seem to understand why his slaves might regard this tacit bargain as preposterous. I found the following convoluted state of affairs very remarkable . At the beginning of the Revolutionary War the British commander Lord Dunmore announced the formation of the Royal Ethiopian Regiment. All slaves who escaped and joined this regiment would be freed. Their uniforms had “Liberty to Slaves” stitched across them. GW hated Lord Dunmore with a passion, called him a monster and “arch-traitor to the rights of humanity”. Meaning the rights of the slave owners. But he very soon accepted free black men into the Continental Army and ended up at the head of “the most integrated American fighting force before the Vietnam War”. [image] CONCLUSION I should have chosen a shorter GW biography, this was way too much. This grand biography is for those who just don’t accept there could ever be a fact about George Washington that isn’t worth knowing. ...more |
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May 19, 2021
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Jul 17, 2021
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Jun 01, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 1847922171
| 9781847922175
| 1847922171
| 4.38
| 18,340
| Jan 2012
| Jan 01, 2012
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it was amazing
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They said well, you love biography but you never read Robert Caro? So the very last time I was in Waterstones (when will you reopen, my oasis?) I saw
They said well, you love biography but you never read Robert Caro? So the very last time I was in Waterstones (when will you reopen, my oasis?) I saw they had all of Caro’s vast 4 volumes (& the world waiting for the fifth) of Lyndon Johnson, and he is my second favourite US president, such a fascinating character, so I got the first volume and jumped in and read 70 pages – it was brilliant. And it seems that Mr Caro is the greatest of the biographers-who-hated-their-subjects. Well, he described LBJ as having A hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will… a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself – or to anyone else – could stand before it During his early political career LBJ had a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal And this kind of stood out for me – there was an early election in his career Johnson still behind by a few votes… Jim Wells Country suddenly announced that its return had somehow not been counted, and the two hundred new votes for Johnson from this precinct – votes cast by people who had all written their names in the same ink, in the same handwriting, and who had voted in alphabetical order – gave Johnson the lead in an election he won by 87 votes. Now being a very impatient kind of reader I wanted to skip to the good bits. In the case of LBJ that was the massive drama of 1963 and what followed. So I ditched the first volume and got a copy of volume 4. This goes from 1959 to January 1964. HOW TO READ ROBERT CARO First, it doesn’t matter which volume you pick up. I never met an author who was so happy to repeat himself – but in this case it’s a good thing. Caro does not expect you to have earnestly ploughed through (and remembered) his every word in chronological order. So he quotes himself from earlier volumes frequently to remind you about older stuff. He circles in the air, he backtracks, he waits for everyone to get on the bus before driving onwards. It’s a great technique. Second, for all his beautiful clarity and patience with his readers, Caro is deadly serious and when he describes how LBJ got a bill through the Senate in the teeth of conservative opposition, he is going to take 30 pages of granular hair-tearing detail to do it. This is 29 pages more than your average reader can take. So a LOT of the pages of this biography will be …er…. will be…. can I say this?... hmmm… skippable! Yes! I think Caro fans will already be taking a contract out on me, but I can provide evidence. It's possible that some readers of the flimsier variety like me will wish to jump over sentences like this one : His solution would require two far-from-routine rulings from the committee chairman, rulings that would in fact fly in the face of the committee’s vote that morning : first, that the Dirksen amendment could be brought back that afternoon and voted on again; and second, that it be brought back by a motion that lumped in with it all remaining amendments before the committee, even those that had not yet been debated, so that a single vote by the committee – a vote to defeat the Dirksen amendment – would be a vote to defeat all the remaining amendments as well, thereby concluding the committee’s work on the tax cut bill and removing the last obstacle to its release to the Senate floor. One sentence. There are lots more like that. For American politics students, this is like hardcore porn. You see everything, I mean, everything. For the other 99.99% of us, hmm, these pages can be a slog and you know what, you get the sense of what was going on even if you don’t follow the precise rules of compound motions to the floor in the Senate in 1963. Whole pages can be skipped. Don’t look at me like that, they can. WHY LBJ? He’s Shakespearean. In his great story you can see scenes from Coriolanus, Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear and Julius Caesar. Not so much the comedies. This guy came from the back of beyond, with poor education, and he used every crooked device to get himself into the Senate, and he used every crooked device to make himself Senate Majority Leader, and then found he was really good at it, then came 1960. He wanted to be president, he had been working his 16 hour days, he was in charge of legislation, he was “the second most powerful politician in the country”, and he had a big problem. Could a guy from the South become president? Here’s where you run into American prejudice, which is not obvious from a British point of view. Everyone knows about racial prejudice, but we’re talking about white-on-white hatred here. A century after the Civil War it appears, in the 1950s and 60s, Americans from the Northern states still feared and distrusted the South, and vice versa. So no Southerner had been president for one hundred years. LBJ wanted to be the next guy from the south in the White House. But there was another problem. Kennedy. LBJ figured Kennedy was a do-nothing lazy-ass playboy whose daddy had bought him a senate seat and who was mostly absent from Senate sessions and who never introduced any legislation, and so who cared about him. But as soon as JFK woke up and decided to run for President, everything changed. It was like someone switched on the light all over America. LBJ was in denial, all through 1960. Then when the Democratic convention happened, he did some head counting, and he realised Kennedy had the whole thing sewn up. That smile had charmed the birds right out of the American air. LBJ could have stayed Senate Majority Leader, second most powerful man in the country. Instead he decided to run with Kennedy and be his Veep if Kennedy won. As every child of five knows, the Vice President is a joke, does nothing, says nothing of any consequence. Why did he do it? From 1960 to 1963 LBJ became Uncle Cornpone, the contemptuous name given to him by the glittering brains of the Kennedy cabinet. He was the stooge from Texas, the useful guy who got Kennedy some essential votes from the southern states, and could now be safely stowed away until 1964. LBJ went from hero to zero so fast he got a nosebleed. Why did he do it? He had made a calculation, which is frankly chilling. One part of his mind saw that he could be the candidate in 1968 when JFK had had his 8 years – fair enough. But another part of his mind saw that seven previous presidents had died in office. So LBJ taking this stupid nothing Veep position was a gamble. Enter stage left : Lee Harvey Oswald. A REMARKABLE TRANSFORMATION It is fantastic to see how a guy who seemed all his life to be a block to social progress, a typical Southern politician really, threw off the ugly carapace and emerged as the reforming president who passed the Civil Rights bill and declared war on poverty. One old Kennedy cabinet member wrote in 1978 : For all his towering ego, his devastating instinct for the weakness of others, his unlimited capacity for self-pity, he was at the same time a man of brilliant intelligence, authentic social passion and deep seriousness. This is such a great story. Now I have to go back to volume one, and also hope Robert Caro stays alive long enough to finish volume five. He’s 84. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 23, 2020
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May 13, 2020
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Apr 23, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 140006354X
| 9781400063543
| 140006354X
| 3.89
| 1,102
| Apr 04, 2006
| Apr 04, 2006
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really liked it
| There’ll be peace without end Every neighbor a friend And every man a king! - Huey Long campaign song, composed by Huey Long THE LOST ART OF THE POLITICAL There’ll be peace without end Every neighbor a friend And every man a king! - Huey Long campaign song, composed by Huey Long THE LOST ART OF THE POLITICAL INSULT Let’s start with the fun part. In those days, the 20s and 30s, they had a real gift for insulting their political opponents. I don’t hear that so much anymore. In the last couple of days Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, said Donald Trump was like a twentieth century fascist – in reply the president called Mayor Khan “a stone cold loser” – really, this is not a patch on the good old days. Huey’s haters : Huey Long is a demagogic screech owl from the swamps of Louisiana A stench in the nostrils of the people of Louisiana, a liar, a briber, an embezzler of other people’s money A boon companion of indicted criminals, a chronic distorter of facts, a habitual double-crosser, a traducer of character, a beneficiary of funds contributed by gamblers, a tyrant suffering from delusions of grandeur, and the singing fool of New Orleans cabarets A reprobate of the first water, a man possessing neither culture nor refinement, a man whose every public or private act is offensive to good taste Big mouth, feeds off suckers, thrives best in mud and slime, and is very hard to catch Huey on his enemies: You pronounce LeBlanc’s name by trying to grunt like a hog and changing your mind when you’re half way through Jim can take the corns off your feet without removing your shoes No music ever sounded one-half so refreshing as the whines and moans of pie-eaters when shoved away from the pie. DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’ He started out not poor – it was useful to massage that truth later on – and once he figured out his thing was politics he did not stop. He speechified everywhere and anywhere, week in, week out, nowhere too small or godforsaken that Huey might not get up on the back of a pickup and fulminate against the mighty to a crowd of seven, he was tireless. And this is how politics used to be done. I have noticed this indefatigable speechifying thing twice before, this non-stop gladhanding truehearted man of the people schtick – once in Adolf Hitler’s career throughout the 1920s, and again in Richard Nixon 1961 to 1967. In all three cases they were very far away from any hope of political power but they did not stop for a second. I don’t of course mean that there were similarities in their politics, but their unflagging obsession to get into office was really astounding. THE KINGFISH He became governor in 1928 and served one 4 year term, then became a senator. He installed a stooge as the next governor (a guy called O K Allen who was so supine he would move out of the governor’s office whenever Huey came barrelling back to Baton Rouge). How Huey got to have total power in Louisiana is that he could hire and fire hundreds of people on the state payroll, and he just went through the entire lot of them and installed his own supporters. Over and over again. Judges, librarians, contractors, whoever. If you were against Huey you got fired. Then, of course, he had his guys controlling electoral registers and making sure the right people voted and the wrong ‘uns didn’t. All of this bag of tricks was old hat but Huey used it with demonic glee and total ruthlessness. And of course he believed he was doing this all in the best cause, it was all for the righteous poor people of Louisiana. As an example of the way Huey rolled, there was an investigation of the state Board of Health and the chairman of that board was asked if the employees of the Board of Health were forced to contribute 10% of their salary towards Huey Long’s political expense account. Oh no, he said, they weren’t forced, “they had to pay it voluntarily.” IT’S ALL IN THE LAW OF GOD What Huey did first for the people of Louisiana is he built thousands of miles of roads. That was good, right? Except they were never more than 18 feet wide (22 feet was the safe minimum) and there was no drainage and no foundations and almost no maintenance, so they eroded away really fast. But they were really popular because they were a lot better than nothing. And not just the highways, there were a hundred new bridges, new schools, free textbooks, free reading classes for 175,000 illiterates, state charity hospitals doubled in size, a new governor’s mansion, a new state capitol, and thousands of extra state workers Huey was all for the poor and wretched, of whom there was no shortage in the early 30s in the Southern states. He would electrify them with roaring handwaving redfaced popeyed Biblical denunciations of inequality. He was against wealth. He was for redistribution. God told you what the trouble was. The philosophers told you what the trouble was; and when you have a country where one man owns more than 100,000 people, or a million people, and when you have a country where there are four men, as in America, that have got more control over things than all the 120,000,000 people together, you know what the trouble is. And again We say to America, 125 million, none shall be too big, none shall be too poor; none shall work too much, none shall be idle. No luxurious mansions empty, none walking the streets, none impoverished, none in pestilence, none in want. But in the land blessed by the smile of the Creator, with everything to be consumed, to be eaten, to be worn... that America will become a land, sharing the fruits of the land, not for the favored few, not to satisfy greed, but that all may live in the land in which the Lord has provided an abundance sufficient for the luxury and convenience of the people in general. He was very popular. He got more mail than all of the other senators combined. Those other old fuddy duddy timeservers in Washington were frankly gobsmacked. People called him a Marxist. He said “I never read a line of Marx or any of them economists. It’s all in the law of God.” WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN At first he supported Roosevelt but quickly decided he wasn’t the real deal, way too timid. By 1935 he was thinking how he could take a run at the presidency himself, whilst still keeping the tightest control over Louisiana where every day the constitution was being shredded, where every day it was looking more like a police state, and where every day the poor folks were still loving Huey P Long in spite of everything. If he had run, he might have been the Bernie Sanders of 1936 – way too radical to get elected – or he might have been the Donald Trump of 1936 – the leftfield rabblerousing maverick who upsets everyone’s idea of how politics works. But we didn’t get to find out because at that point Huey P Long was assassinated. ...more |
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As America went up in flames in 1968 young people descended on the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August to protest against the Vietnam War. It t
As America went up in flames in 1968 young people descended on the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August to protest against the Vietnam War. It turned into several days of riots, police onslaughts, broken heads, broken hotel windows, it was not a happy experience for anyone. The new Nixon administration in 1969 decided to make an example of these so called revolutionaries and Black Panthers and Yippies so they put eight alleged organisers of the rioting on trial. The defendants and their lawyers often played this amazing trial for laughs. They were up before Judge Julius Hoffman who was 75. Of course today, you get Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan and Neil Young and the Stones all in their mid to late 70s and they’re still rocking away and issuing albums and touring, it’s a redefinition of old age, but in those days (1969) people in their mid 70s were PROPERLY OLD and they knew nothing about electric guitars, drugs and hippies, the last singer they’d heard of was Bobby Darin, so this was a huge culture clash leading to some exchanges like : William Kunstler, for the Defence : She is trying to give a political answer to a political question. Judge : This is not a political case as far as I am concerned. WK : Well, your Honor, as far as some of the rest of us are concerned, it is quite a political case. Judge : It is a criminal case. There is an indictment here. I have the indictment right up here. I can’t go into politics here in this court. WK : Your Honor, Jesus was accused criminally too, and we understand really that was not truly a criminal case in the sense-- Judge : I didn’t live at that time. I don’t know. Some people think I go that far back, but really I didn’t. WK : Well, I was assuming your Honor had read of the incident. And there is lots of this kind of stuff: Leonard Weinglass for the Defence : Will you please identify yourself for the record? Abbie Hoffman : My name is Abbie. I am an orphan of America. LW: Where do you reside? AH : I live in Woodstock Nation. LW: Will you tell the court and jury where it is? AH: Yes, it is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way the Sioux Indians carried the Sioux Nation around with them. What was not so funny was when Bobby Seale, the one black member of the Chicago Eight, demanded his own lawyer, but his lawyer could not be present, & so demanded that he was allowed to represent himself. The judge disallowed that. Seale continued to demand his rights. The judge eventually blew a gasket and – believe it or not – ordered the court marshals to bind and gag Bobby Seale. So day after day the spectacle was of the one black man of the 8 defendants manacled to a chair and gagged with thick cloth. [image] This book is mostly just the best bits from the trial transcript. You will laugh, you will cry, but mostly you will be gobsmacked. ...more |
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it was amazing
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SYRIA, JFK AND THINKING ABOUT THINKING The BBC tells me : Syrian opposition activists, rescue workers and medics say more than 40 people were killed on SYRIA, JFK AND THINKING ABOUT THINKING The BBC tells me : Syrian opposition activists, rescue workers and medics say more than 40 people were killed on 7 April in a suspected chemical attack on Douma, which was the last rebel-held town in the Eastern Ghouta region. Syrian government and Russian spokesmen have dismissed this. They say there was no chemical attack at all, the footage was faked to provide a pretext for an unprovoked missile attack by the western Allies on 14 April. The same accusations followed by flat denials happened after the Salisbury nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal on 4th March. According to Theresa May it was Putin; according to Putin it was MI6 trying to frame him. We flounder in a blizzard of fake news, but some of the news is true. How are we, the ordinary people, we who have no security clearance, we who know nobody who is anybody, how do we figure out what’s going on? When everything is disputed, how do we begin? The JFK assassination is one of the great examples of disputed history. 55 years later there is no agreement about one of the most public of events. How could this be? I found myself being drawn into the JFK whirlpool. I had discovered the big kahuna, Vincent Bugliosi’s 1600 page Reclaiming History, which is the massive restatement of the official position, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and acted alone. I knew that maybe 80% of the American people don’t believe that. 80% of the American population is 260 million people – so where do they get their JFK information from? The biggest, most popular pro-conspiracy statement is Oliver Stone’s 3 hour long movie JFK. So it was time to watch the movie and reread the book of the movie. [image] The movie is brilliant (6 Oscar nominations and 2 wins for cinematography and editing – absolutely right, both are fantastic.) If you don’t believe in the conspiracy, of course, this makes JFK the most successful lying propaganda film of all time and a terrible disservice to the American public. Don’t mean to be insulting but if you think LHO killed JFK by himself, then that’s what it is. Vincent Bugliosi says this : Not even God can change the past. However, if we define history in the broader sense of that which succeeding generations believe and accept as the truth, then Stone, more than any other single American, is responsible for 75% of Americans currently believing that a dark and wide-ranging conspiracy involving the higher reaches of our government was responsible for the death of President Kennedy. (Vince takes 90 pages in his big ole book to demolish the movie in detail. Vince does everything in detail.) WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY THAT YOU BELIEVE THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY? The one proposed by the movie, as explained in two giant speeches, was perpetrated by the dark forces of the “military-industrial complex”. There were meetings involving those at the “very highest level”. Kennedy’s Vietnam policy was the problem. He wanted to pull out. Contracts worth billions would vanish in smoke if that happened. So a decision was arrived at – he had to go. Three shooters were organised, the motorcade route was fixed so Kennedy’s car would slow down to ten mph at one point, creating a “kill zone”. Normal security surrounding the presidential visit was “stood down” on the day. A patsy was secured to take the rap. It was all arranged. These were the men really in charge of America in 1963, men who would do that. Principles? None. Democracy and the rule of law? Don’t make us laugh. Does this make America in 1963 like any tin pot dictatorship where you get elections with only one candidate, fictitious voters lists and stuffed ballot boxes, where the military have only contempt for the people? Yes, although a lot more complicated than those countries. Was America really governed by a crypto-fascist warmongering elite? So the conspiracy says (the one put forward in the movie). Vincent Bugliosi 15 years after the film put the matter like this : Even if we imagine the unimaginable, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and leaders of American industry were crazy enough to be willing to murder kennedy would they be so crazy as not to at least first try to beat him at the ballot box by putting all their money, power and influence behind his opponent when he came up for election in just one year? Next question: was this elite, the elite which (literally) called the shots, ever got rid of, or has it been in charge of the USA since the 1960s? Leading to the next question: is the USA a democracy at all? Or is all the voting just smoke & mirrors, the distractions used by the stage magician? Come on, sheeple, wake up! I think the 260 million Americans are not really thinking that. But the implications of the belief in a conspiracy tend inexorably towards the rewriting of what up to now has been an accepted historical American reality, that it is a (more or less) democratic country of the people (more or less) by the people (more or less) and for the people (more or less - and eventually, once you have redefined the non white population as “people” – that took some time. LBJ, the beneficiary of this conspiracy, tried his best to make that happen). I think the 260 million Americans more or less sort of shrug and say well, you know, it looks so fishy, one nutty guy who happens to be a great marksman, three shots, including a magic bullet which zig zagged, then some other lone gunman conveniently knocks off the patsy before he can start to spill the beans, must have been something going on. And some of them have seen the movie and think yes, I sort of thought as much. Damn, it should be shown in every school! ANOTHER STRANGE THING But if the conspiracy could rise to the massive crime of killing the president, you might have thought they could have put Oliver Stone in a body bag before his movie came out and blew the lid off. After all, we know about how all those annoying witnesses ended up dead. Come to that, why aren’t all the major conspiracy theorists dead too? JUST A PERSONAL TENDENCY I find it a lot easier to believe in the lone gunman theory. Actually, just to be clear, I believe in it because I think it’s true! Every other week in America lone gunmen decide to shoot some people. We are all very familiar with this aspect of society. Quite a number of these types have had a go at the President. It’s not that unusual. But I confess a psychological tendency towards disbelief in any conspiracy. It wasn’t Mossad or the Bush government who attacked the World Trade Center; they did land on the moon; the MRI vaccine does not cause autism; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fake, and Sandy Hook was real. THE BOOK OF THE FILM : A STRANGE BEAST The first third of this book is the screenplay, but : It is not the final film. Certain scenes in this screenplay have been cut and some have been transposed to other places in the film. So an already complicated and possibly confusing film which intersperses actual documentary footage with staged footage with made up scenes (“speculations on what might have happened” Stone writes) is made that much more complicated by this odd decision to use an early draft. The rest of the book is a whole bundle of articles about the movie and to Stone’s credit all the ferocious attacks are included. Except for that launched by Vincent Bugliosi 15 years later of course. For anyone wishing to begin their slide down the biggest rabbithole in US history, the movie and this book is a great place to start. That’s why it gets 5 stars from me. [image] ...more |
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| 0393347338
| 9780393347333
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| 4.22
| 1,708
| 2007
| Sep 23, 2013
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it was amazing
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John 20:25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the John 20:25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. You know, Thomas had a point. But what do you do if the motorcade has long since roared away to the hospital, if all the blood has been scrubbed away, all the spent bullets bagged and in some official charnelhouse, all the witnesses dead or demented? There’s no more thrusting of hands into anyone’s side, nowhere to check where nails or bullets made their terminal sunderings of mortal flesh. All we can do is read our books and decide which reality suits us best. Myself, I am for the Chaos Party. Many people I know are for the Conspiracy Party. But chaos, I think, is the safe bet. No one is in charge, you know. They don’t have the brains. The onrushing sequence of horrible events is still breathtaking. Everything about the JFK assassination is complicated but this particular book is as straightforward as it could possibly get, an hour by hour account of what happened between 6.30am on Friday, 22 November 1963 and 4.00pm on Monday, 25 November 1963. Like everyone else, I find what happened to be almost incredible – this weasel Oswald was able to shoot half of Kennedy’s head off from the 6th floor of the warehouse where he so conveniently worked using a not especially sophisticated rifle bought for $18.50? And then this other weirdo Jack Ruby, local strip club owner and major Kennedy fan, crushed with grief but with no major plan in mind, finds himself with the perfect opportunity to exact revenge – just waltzes into the crowded-with-newsmen space at the exact time the cops are taking Oswald off to the Big House, the exact precise time, and lo and behold he has his gun on him (because he was always walking round with large amounts of cash on him) and on the spur of the moment whips out his gun and fires one single bullet which kills Oswald – I mean, come on. So the official version is – TWO lone gunmen, Oswald and Ruby, and no conspiracy at all. These days we all choose which reality we wish to believe in and don’t pay too much attention to facts because what’s a fact anyway, is there any such thing as a fact? Aren’t all these so-called facts all really statements made by somebody’s prosecution or somebody’s defense? Well, I thought I knew pretty much kind of more or less what happened on that terrible weekend and I really didn’t, so this was a great read. Highly recommended. THE SMALL PRINT – HOW THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT AND WHY IS IT CALLED PARKLAND AND HAS A STICKER ON IT – KIND OF BORING, CAN BE IGNORED Vincent Bugliosi became instantly famous in 1971 for prosecuting Charles Manson and his gang. Then he published Helter Skelter, the account of the Manson case, in 1974, which according to Wikipedia is the best selling true crime book of all time. (That surprised me – what about In Cold Blood?). Then in 1986 a British TV company hired him to prosecute Lee Harvey Oswald in a historical drama of the trial that never happened. He then got obsessed not so much with the JFK assassination itself but with the mass of conspiracy theories about it. So he spent 20 years piling up all the available info and writing the all time account of what he ended up calling “the most complex murder case in history by far”. So in 2007 he published the enormous Reclaiming History (1600 pages plus CD rom of another two thousand pages of notes). The first part of that beast is called “Matters of Fact : What Happened” (as opposed to part 2 which is called “Delusions of Conspiracy : What did Not Happen”). And the first part of the first part is called Four Days in November. They decided to publish this first part of the first part as a separate paperback to assist those who might incur spinal injuries attempting to lift the hardback. Now enter Tom Hanks! He at some point thought Four Days in November would make a great miniseries. But that fell apart, and he ended up making a movie called Parkland (named after the hospital). So naturally they republished the paperback under the new title and vulgarised the whole thing with the standard sticker : Now a Major Motion Picture. In fact the motion picture was a minor one at the box office even if a lot of viewers thought it was worthy and pretty decent. [image] ...more |
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| 074356667X
| 9780743566674
| 074356667X
| 4.12
| 1,439
| Jan 01, 2007
| May 22, 2007
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really liked it
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A REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION WHICH IS ONLY 45 PAGES LONG (BE THANKFUL FOR SMALL MERCIES). Our manic author makes some very interesting points in his int A REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION WHICH IS ONLY 45 PAGES LONG (BE THANKFUL FOR SMALL MERCIES). Our manic author makes some very interesting points in his intro. Since very few of you will be reading this book, I'm guessing, it's worth listing them here. 1. JFK’s image, his popularity, is not based on what he accomplished but the promise of what he was going to accomplish. The grief and trauma of the assassination was because of the death of what America was going to be like, compared to what it became. Under LBJ and Nixon an undeclared low level civil war broke out in America; there were more assassinations; there was Vietnam and Watergate; it was a terrible time. The JFK myth implies that none of that would have happened if he had lived. So the assassination is the key sliding-door moment for America. 2. In 1964 70% of the American public agreed with the conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Now, around 75% of the American public thinks there was a conspiracy. At least 1000 books have been written about the assassination, but 95% of them have been from the pro-conspiracy/anti-Warren Commission side of the argument. The public has only heard one side. 3. The conspiracy theorists do not agree on who was behind the conspiracy but they all have to include the Warren Commission members, who not only covered up the conspiracy but framed Oswald as well. Members included Earl Warren and Gerald Ford and of course a bunch of top nobs. VB says this fact alone makes the idea of a conspiracy ridiculous. He swings with both fists from the get go and you can feel the pent-up frustration letting loose finally as he starts handing it out to those malicious fools who have been peddling their stupid theories for half a century. (You can tell that's what he's thinking because that's actually what he says, more or less.) But his belligerence will not make any converts. Not, as i already said, that there would be any converts. If you believe there was a conspiracy, nothing in heaven or earth will convince you that you're wrong. It's like a religious thing. 4. “A tenacious, indefatigable, and, in many cases, fraudulent group of conspiracy theorists” have transformed a relatively simple murder case “into its present form of the most complex murder case by far in world history.” 5. The anti-conspiracy argument is necessarily less interesting than the pro. The conspiracy theorists however are suffering from the fallacy whereby people think great events must have great causes, and so by extension great events can’t be caused by some miserable nobody like Oswald. It must have been some grand conspiracy…. That makes an emotional sense. Similarly, in movies, the big villain, say, the Sheriff of Nottingham, has to die at the hands of the big hero, Robin Hood, at the end of the movie, and not be killed by some random arrow shot by a nameless outlaw. 6. The source of 95% of the theorists’ arguments is “some document, affidavit or testimony” contained in…. the Warren Commission report or its ancillary 27 volumes of files. Yes, the very source they say was corrupted from the get go. I must say I was rather jarred by finding out that this whole giant enterprise was based on a television reconstruction of the trial of Oswald which never happened. The tv show was shown in 1986. So that's where VB got going. It took him 20 years to produce his giant book and you can see where the time went. When I'll get up the energy to tackle the whole thing I don't know. ...more |
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| Nov 01, 2001
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really liked it
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America has the world caught in two unbreakable embraces, one soft, exciting, where we all want to stay; and the other militarist, violent, careless o
America has the world caught in two unbreakable embraces, one soft, exciting, where we all want to stay; and the other militarist, violent, careless of other peoples’ countries. The first is Disney, Hollywood and rock and roll, the second Iraq, Vietnam and Fox News. I may be English to the core, but more than half of everything I read is American; probably three quarters of what I listen to is American, and, I don’t know, 90% of all the movies I watch. And that’s okay, if it wasn’t I wouldn’t do it. It’s not that I’m an Americaphile, except insofar as the whole world is. America is a vast cultural factory. Its production rate is phenomenal. Who invented – and continues to invent – modern life? America. At the same time, America’s politics scare me, both the internal and the external variety. Politically and economically, America isn’t cosy at all, not for non-Americans, and not for quite a few Americans too. It struck me that all my American history (up to LBJ, anyway) has been told to me by singers, actors, novelists, poets, sculptors, painters, dancers, directors, everyone except historians. Hence, my attempt on this vast one-volume history of the whole shebang. As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway: I saw below me that golden valley: This land was made for you and me. Things fell into place. Hugh Brogan is like a smoothly running giant thresher machine, in goes all the human bodies, the blood, tears, heartbreak, strife and struggle and out comes neat hay-bales of rolling cadenced paragraphs. He’s old school. He’s the way things used to be done, as opposed to, say, Niall Ferguson, who grabs your lapels, drags you round the corner, whispers in your ear, picks your pocket, gets you drunk and leaves you in a motel somewhere in Missouri. Not so Hugh. I think there may be two mild jokes Hugh allows himself in this entire 700 pages. I’d quote them, but you wouldn’t laugh. But here is the grand rolling diorama of the world’s greatest experimental nation-state. Here’s Jamestown, the Stamp Act, the tea party, here’s the shot heard round the world, Fort Ticonderoga, Bunker Hill, Washington, the Declaration, the Constitution, slavery, Buffalo Bill Cody (an ancient lady in my family, dead 40 years, saw him live in Nottingham in 1903), Mormons, the trail of tears, the wild west, and here’s slavery. For me the heart of the matter here was the story of slavery and the Civil War. This is history at its most painfully dramatic – I would say melodramatic. See them big plantations burning Hear the cracking of the whips Smell that sweet magnolia blooming See the ghosts of slavery ships I can hear them tribes a-moaning Hear that undertaker’s bell And I know nobody can sing the blues Like Blind Willie McTell For the first time I understood a little bit how specifically peculiar the South was, how skewed its cotton monoculture, how profound its dreadfulness. Brogan’s language is sometimes jarring in its mildness here. Many Southern women had to pretend not to notice the resemblance between their own offspring and certain little black children on the plantations : proof that their husbands and brothers had been dallying in the slave quarters. “Dallying”? How about “raping” ? Perhaps an indication, like the use of “native Americans” to mean white people born in the USA as opposed to immigrants, that this book was written in 1983. I would like to shamble discursively through American history, throwing old song lyrics and advertising jingles into the mix until I sound like a John Dos Passos novel from 1922. I’m glad I’m now clearer about what robber barons were and how machine politics works, and how John Brown’s soul has had to do a whole lot of marching on, and how Obama in the White House seems even more extraordinary than I thought it was in 2008 , but I think I tax your patience enough in these reviews. This book is recommended. Swing low, chariot, come down easy Taxi to the terminal zone; Cut your engines, cool your wings, And let me make it to the telephone. Los Angeles, give me Norfolk Virginia, Tidewater four ten o nine Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin' And the poor boy is on the line ...more |
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Mar 02, 2014
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Feb 11, 2014
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| 1616882689
| 9781616882686
| 4.24
| 10,117
| May 13, 2008
| Apr 14, 2009
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it was amazing
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A supplemental review! - this is just some of my favourite outrageous quotes from Mr Perlstein and his mostly less than merry pranksters - starting wi
A supplemental review! - this is just some of my favourite outrageous quotes from Mr Perlstein and his mostly less than merry pranksters - starting with a jarring fact I found quite jaw-dropping: …an LA cop stopped a black man named Leonard Deadwyler for speeding through Watts. He had been speeding [his wife] to the nearest hospital, miles away; there was no hospital in Watts, an area twice the size of Manhattan. P89 Here's something that will ring a bell with anyone who watches the news: The Pentagon claimed what civilian casualties there were [in Vietnam] came from the Communists’ deliberate emplacement of surface-to-air missiles in populated areas. P 196 Ah, that old one – wasn’t our fault! They made us kill all those women and children! A song which has been sweetly sung by everyone at one time or another, most recently by President Assad. They make me kill these children just so that I look really bad! How mean of them! Don’t you realise their little game? The problem was facing the wrath of all those decent Americans who didn’t want to face that their government was mad. P171 Mendel Rivers, House Armed Services Committee chairman, 1966 : Flatten Hanoi and tell the world to go fly a kite. P171 After a big Stop the Draft targeting the Pentagon in October 1967 : Two contending sets of rumors circulated: that cleanup crews found “nothing but bras and panties – you never saw so many”. And that two marchers had been dragged into the building and summarily executed. P 216 On Martin Luther King in 1967 : He now frankly called himself a socialist. P250 (I didn’t know that) A cop in 1967 talks about hippies : Here’s a bunch of animals who call themselves the next leaders of the country…I almost had to vomit. It’s like dealing with any queer pervert, mother raper, or any of those other bedbugs we’ve got crawling around the Village. As a normal human being, you feel like knocking every one of their teeth out. It’s a normal reaction. And why? Because of this kind of thing: We will burn Chicago to the ground! We will fuck on the beaches! We demand the politics of ecstasy! Acid for all! Abandon the Creeping Meatball! YIPPIE!! Chicago – August 25-30. P291 At the trial of the Chicago 8 : Questions asked during jury selection: Do you know who Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin are? If your children are female, do they wear brassieres all the time? P447 Abbie Hoffman rose with a flourish and blew a kiss at the jury. The Judge, sternly : “The jury is directed to disregard the kiss from Mr Hoffman.” P415 Rand Corporation’s Vietnam experts : Short of destroying the entire country and its people, we cannot eliminate the enemy force in Vietnam by military means. Reported in the New York Times, October 1968. P423 Nixon quoted talking to a White House aide, late 68: It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it or because it is part of you and you need it as much as an arm or a leg… You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance. P460 Jerry Rubin. 10 April 1970 : The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. And I mean that quite literally, because until you’re prepared to kill your parents you’re not ready to change this country. Our parents are our first oppressors. P475 (I think Pol Pot was a Yippie then – his revolution was only five years in the future). A Gallup poll found 58% blamed the Kent State students for their own deaths. Only 11% blamed the National Guard. P489 By that time National guardsmen were posted on 21 campuses in 16 states, 488 universities and colleges were closed (three quarters of the schools in Nevada and Maryland), the entire public school system in New York City was shut by order of the board of education… p490 Nixon in 1970 : Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans – mostly under 30 – are determined to destroy our society. P518 Nixon again in 1971 : I rate myself as a deeply committed pacifist p546 New York Times talking about California in 1971 : Prophets of doom are as common as girls in bikinis (there are even a few prophets of doom in bikinis). P541 Charles Reich in The Greening of America talking about bell-bottom jeans : They have to be worn to be understood… They give the ankles a freedom as if to invite dancing right on the street… p542 One of the prominent spokesmen for Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a “handsome, charismatic 27 year old” called John Kerry – yes, THAT John Kerry. I had no idea! [image] After the verdict on Lieut William Calley (in charge of the My Lai massacre) – Within 24 hours the White House got 100,000 telegrams, calls and letters, 100 to 1 for Calley’s release. P556 In July 1972 Jerry Rubin popped up again – one magazine had this headline: McGovern Backer No Longer Thinks Sons, Daughters, Should Kill Parents p686 George Meany, 1972 : The Democratic Party has been taken over by people named Jack who look like Jills and smell like johns. P695 FBI note, mid 1972 : Lennon appears to be radically oriented however he does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics. P714 [image] God bless you sir! And madam! Have a lovely evening! ...more |
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liked it
| A REVIEW MADE OUT OF QUOTATIONS Havelock Ellis : The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds A REVIEW MADE OUT OF QUOTATIONS Havelock Ellis : The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born. VOICES FROM THE 1930s The armies of defective and delinquent persons in every nation and race, the crowded hospitals, asylums, jails and penitentiaries in almost every country, the enormous cost of caring for this human wreckage and wastage, all testify to the fact that there is urgent need for improvement. Indeed it is merely a question of how long civilization can continue to carry this ever-increasing burden of bungled and botched, of paupers, feebleminded and insane, of bums, thugs and criminals. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. [image] We examine and license plumbers and steamfitters to make sure they are competent… is it going too far then to say that the unqualified human being be enjoined from creating life, and instilling in a baby a diseased and criminal mind? Germany is by no means the first to enact laws to permit or compel sterilization of hereditary mental defectives. Some 15,000 unfortunates have thus far been harmlessly and humanely operated upon in the United States to prevent them from propagating their own kind. THE OKLAHOMA LAW (This is copied from http://americanwiki.pbworks.com/w/pag...) Oklahoma House Bill No. 64, Chapter 26, Article 3 states “That whenever the superintendent of the Hospital for the Insane at Vinita, Oklahoma, or of the Hospital at Supply, Oklahoma, or the Institute for the Feeble-Minded at Enid, Oklahoma, or of any other such institution supported in whole or in part from public funds shall be of the opinion that it is best for society, that any male patient under the age of 65 years and any female patient under the age of 47 years, and which patients are about to be discharged from said institution, should be sexually sterilized.” In 1933, this law was expanded to include “patients likely to be a public or partial public charge” and habitual criminal offenders who had three or more felony convictions. In 1935, the state passed the Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act which allowed for judges to include the sterilization of certain criminals with two or more felonies as part of the offender’s punishment. The feeble-minded girl is characteristically prone to loose sexual relationships. [image] In May 1937 one poll found that 84% of the nation favoured “sterilization of the habitual criminal and the hopelessly insane”. And now, the voice of the author, Victoria Nourse : For all the hype surrounding the mapping of the human genome, we now know that much of the hoped-for success in genetic prediction of behaviour and psychological disease has not materialised; widely publicized studies of genes “for” everything from criminality to schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism, homosexuality, risk-taking and religiosity “have either been retracted, rebutted, or have yet to be replicated successfully”. The truth is that the determinism implicit in the popular idea of the gene is false; behavioural genetics is a science of statistical correlation, not determination. The heritability statistics which fuel ideas like the “God gene” or the “gay gene” routinely trade on public misunderstanding. Despite the name, heritability statistics cannot prove inheritance. Like stock markets and hemlines, they deserve no greater respect than the claims of any correlational study. And finally, in case you thought this whole sterilization of the unfit was just another weird 1930s thing : Court to decide on sterilisation of man with learning difficulties The Independent, Friday 02 August 2013 The Court of Protection could make legal history this month if it sanctions the sterilisation of a man with learning difficulties who lacks the ability to give permission. In what has been described as a “truly exceptional case”, Mrs Justice Eleanor King is set to rule whether it is in the best interests of a 36-year-old man from the Midlands with moderate to severe learning difficulties to be sterilised by means of a vasectomy. The application was made by an NHS Trust and is backed by the man’s parents, GP, and local authority. It is said the man, who can only be referred to as DE for legal reasons, does not have the capacity to make the decision himself. ...more |
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| 4.24
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it was amazing
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You’re trudging slowly along one of those interminable moving walkways you get in airports; you have your political luggage with you. Each side of the
You’re trudging slowly along one of those interminable moving walkways you get in airports; you have your political luggage with you. Each side of the walkway a thousand things are happening, it’s hard to take them all in – newspapers, blaring tv debates, screens showing footage of all kinds of violent bombings and assassinations, there's yelling ranting crowds on each side, there are looming politician’s faces spewing statistics and believable cures for cancer; and raining down on you a steady drizzle of pamphlets from all manner of weird unheard-of groups, each more extreme than the other. Somewhere in the back of all this racket, you can hear Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star-Spangled Banner. So you put Nixonland down for today. But when you pick it up tomorrow, you’re back trudging along the interminable moving walkway, again. It's June 1969. There's a long way to go. And just when you think – oww, my mind is obliterated, this is death by facts – along comes something you actually always wanted to know about, and how it fit in to the 60s, Attica, Soledad, Angela Davis, Jerry Rubin, all those half-heard names. Here they all are, bawling in your ear, dancing in your face. This is history as total immersion. Perlstein blasts every fact and factlet about every political month, week, day, almost hour, onto the page - and there is so so much to say about absolutely everything that happened, this 1965-72 period, it was one long helter-skelter of HUGE happenings, every day another city burning, another assassination, another pig riot, another lie from Nixon, another Vietnam atrocity, society coming apart at the seams, murder in the very air. Every time I thought - I can skip this - nah, along would come something unmissable. RP projectile vomits this stuff relentlessly, every paragraph packed solid, every sentence a heavy one, and he writes like a slightly toned-down Tom (Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) Wolfe, all, slangy and impudent, a maximalist historian as DFW and Pynchon are maximalist novelists. Shove everything in. Everything. IT’S ALL PRETTY SIMPLE REALLY What I believe RP wishes me to extract from this howling tumult was three big ones. RP characterises the 50s and early 60s as a time of optimism, culminating in LBJ’s civil rights legislation 64-66. But then it all splintered . What happened NEXT was a) Vietnam – its immorality became too painful, the American dead unignorable – 50,000 by 1970; and the draft meant that YOU or your son might be next up AMERICAN DEAD
Like Country Joe sang in 1968, be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box. Vietnam drove everyone mad. If you were for it, you were okay with the idea of burning little children with napalm or machinegunning them, like at My Lai; you thought that My Lais happened all the time in war. If you were against it, you were part of a conspiracy to impose the Communist way of life on America and destroy its freedom forever. b) Civil rights for black people – specifically, now that Johnson got the legislation passed in 64-66, actually enforcing the laws whereby segregation in schools and housing was outlawed. I didn’t know how much organising and upsetting people Martin Luther King actually did, now I do, and it’s surprising he wasn’t shot before 68 as the blatant race hatred on display here is stunning. Also worth mentioning is the background noise of the youth counterculture with its long hair, bell bottomed jeans (those bell bottoms seemed to especially rile some people) and promotion of dope. So - a time of extremes, the longest and nastiest war perpetrated by the USA which everyone from the Pentagon down could see them LOSING – the largest ever generation gap – look at what happened in seven short years from 1963 to 1970, from Pat Boone and Connie Francis to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Which ones died in pools of their own drugged vomit? Clue : not Pat or Connie. Students were taking their professors hostage and burning down schools, National Guardsmen were shooting them DEAD, bombs going off here, there and everywhere thanks to nut jobs like the Weathermen. You can see why the reactionaries were panicking. Everybody likes to analyse Nixon, it’s fun for all the family. Perlstein sticks to the known script here – Nixon always had a chip on his shoulder about rich people telling the less well off how to run their lives, he was a bitter and resentful man and he used all that well during this scary period in which everyone had somebody they were hating on. Well, I got tired of RP banging on with his Orthogonians vs. Franklins cute little formula. (Nixon formed a club called the Orthogonians in college because he wasn’t accepted by the upper class student society.) I got it by page 50 but it gets repeated at regular intervals for the whole 750 pages. Anyway, it is quite true that Nixon harnessed the white working class/lower middle class bitterness/fear/resentment of the anti-war filthy hippy youth crowd and the privileged liberal class who abetted them and created these cursed civil rights laws, the Kennedy gang, the McGoverns, you know who, and the blacks like those terrifying Panthers and the even more terrifying ones who think they have the right to move in next door to you just because they’ve got the asking price for the house. How did they get that much dough anyway? What’s happening to this country? Nixon was good at putting all of that simmering detestation into square, solemn language. You knew where you were with Nixon, he hated the same people you did. Nixon’s journey from derided two time loser (1960 for president, 1962 for governor of California) to presidential candidate in 1968 is fascinating stuff. (The other half of that story is how Johnson went from clouds of civil rights glory in 1964/5 to hated buffoon in 1967 – we only glance at that story from the outside here, so I will be grabbing a Johnson bio very soon.) Nixon knew two things – the public are fundamentally conservative, and the press are fundamentally liberal. That meant he would win, but it would be a struggle. By 68 it was clear he couldn’t lose, that’s how much Johnson had unravelled. But then it turned out winning, being the actual President, wasn’t enough. He still didn’t have the control he wanted because of a hostile Congress. He needed a second term. He began to believe that he was the only person who could set things right in America. Obviously the vile Democrats couldn’t, but nor yet could the other fools in the Republican party. As far as RN was concerned, RN was America’s only hope. That meant everybody which might stop a second term must be squashed. This is where the illegal stuff came in. Which as you know, if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. Right? Right. So he won in 72, a gigantic landslide, 49 states. But Republicans still couldn’t get into Congress. The story of 72 was that Americans still liked Democrats EXCEPT McGovern. Perlstein’s boiling geyser of facts'n'info finally stops in page 746 and he gives himself 2 pages to sum everything up. He’s making the argument that the vicious social and political divide over which Nixon presided and abetted set the fault lines of American politics for decades, that they’re still there, not so violent now but quite clear – look at the way the map divides into the red and the blue states; look at the anti-abortionists, the Tea Party and the Truthers; look at the way it’s an article of faith for many Americans to disbelieve everything their own government ever says. That's me speaking there, he doesn't use those examples). AND IN THE END Is Nixonland just a printout of the notes RP took while he read through his complete sets of Time, Life, USA Today and TV Guide (plus all surviving video footage from Huntley-Brinkley) 1965 to 1972? After all there's the matter of telling wood from trees which is what we hire these damned historians for anyway, what use are they otherwise? Whatever happened to discrimination? The telling detail? The organising principle? RP seems to think every detail of American life during these years was telling. Is this maximalism or is this abdication? So that is why by page 500 the fifth star was beginning to flicker on and off. But finally I thought well, this is some kind of achievement all right. It really is. And now I need a looooongggg rest. **** My favourite quotes from this remarkable book are here http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... ...more |
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| 0671603477
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| 0671603477
| 4.75
| 12
| Jan 1985
| Jan 01, 1985
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really liked it
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Pete Seeger, the oldest living American folk singer, 107 years old and still going strong, visited the Occupy Wall Street protest recently and sang a
Pete Seeger, the oldest living American folk singer, 107 years old and still going strong, visited the Occupy Wall Street protest recently and sang a rousing version of John Lennon's Happiness is a Warm Bank and an acoustic version of the old Motown classic Asset-backed Commercial Paper The best things in life are free But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees Just gimme asset-backed commercial paper That's what I want I saw this on youtube. You could call me a fellow traveller, I've been one all my llife, I did go on one protest march once, but that's a story for another day. So, I fellow-occupy at the moment. But only in my mind. I can't just uproot my comfortable middle class existence and go and live in a scrotty tent amongst hippy detritus and woozy aspirations. It's December, it's really cold in London. If it was July, well I might book a couple of days off and go and chat to a few of these enthusiastic young thinkers. I really like the idea of a protest which deliberately refuses to promote an agenda. Usually the protesters are shoving some improbably ten-point manifesto in your face, but this time they cheerfully say they haven't got a clue what should happen, they just know this can't go on [image] In my mind I am also occupying the City of London. And Wall Street. And BNP Paribas. And J P Morgan Chase. But I'm going further than that. In my mind I am occupying 10 Downing Street. And the White House. And the Forbidden City. They are full of my mental tents and placards. They can't move for them. In my mind I'm marching up and down and beseeching them They know I'm not that happy with the way they're conducting this whole human race thing. It's pitiful. The thing is, beyond saving the whale, forcing Macdonalds to be cow-neutral and making kindness compulsory for everybody on the entire planet, I have no idea what to do. Pete... what do you think? Anybody? ...more |
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Dec 18, 2011
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| 9780670022205
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| 4.18
| 19,595
| Apr 04, 2011
| Apr 05, 2011
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really liked it
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This is a dense, thorough, dour book and I found it tough going most of the time, for a variety of reasons. Malcolm X is a complex and hair-raising su
This is a dense, thorough, dour book and I found it tough going most of the time, for a variety of reasons. Malcolm X is a complex and hair-raising subject. When we follow Malcolm through his tortured life, and it was tortured, we find ourselves face to face with some very disturbing views and statements and actions. The usual trajectory laid across Malcolm's life is that after the break from the Nation of Islam, and his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, he became an enlightened all-embracing champion of humanity – gone were the terrifying denunciations, and the implacable race hatred was visibly melting. And this upset some people, so he was assassinated, like Gandhi, like Martin Luther King, like RFK. But it really wasn't like that at all. THE NATION OF ISLAM One thing this book has to do is provide a handy summary of the creation and development of the Nation of Islam in the USA. Atheists need look no further for clear – and indeed heartrending - proof that religion is largely composed of human wish-fulfilment. The NOI was a cult which emerged in the 1930s in Detroit, Chicago and a few other Northern American cities. The weird and racist theories spun by Elijah Muhammed, which formed a defining myth for the NOI, were as nasty as anything imagined by the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or indeed Adolf Hitler. But of course, there the comparison ends, because it's almost impossible to understand how the Jews came to provoke such pathological hatred in Hitler's (and many other's) minds - but it's extremely easy to see why white people could be seen as 100% evil devil creatures by black people in the early to middle 20th century. The psychology of this particular brand of racism is very clear. Why wouldn't you hate people who hate you so much and prove it every day? (Quick question : when is a weird little cult a religion? Answer : when it started two thousand years ago and was lucky enough to have great poets write its holy books.) Anyway, the NOI took a number of concepts and ideas from Islam and threw them in a pot and stirred them up with a whole lot of invented stuff. Not too dissimilar to Scientology and Mormonism and all the other cults. And this is what all religions did in their beginnings, of course. All deities reside in the human breast. – William Blake. The NOI did not do well in its first years, less than 1000 members by 1953. In opposition to every other black organisation, they preached non-involvement in politics. They were against blacks voting in elections! And they were 100% segregationist. They had this whole Yakub's History thing going. This is where they said that a black scientist many thousands of years ago deliberately created the white race during a eugenics experiment. And the white race is irredemably evil. That's the way they were, that's the way they will be, they can't change. They were radical and they wanted separatism, ideally in a state of their own. They had only contempt for the tiny black middle class – they were all Toms. (Everyone who wasn't a Muslim was a Tom – when Martin Luther King arrived on the scene he was a Tom too, according to Elijah.) The NOI mindset led them down some crazy pathways. Malcolm met with the KKK, as previously Marcus Garvey had done, to discover if there were any areas they could find to work together for mutual benefit. The KKK and the NOI were both believers in total separation of the races, so why not? Likewise, a few years later, the NOI invited the American Nazi Party to attend some of their rallies. George Lincoln Rockwell, the Nazi leader, gave the NOI a ringing endorsement, saying that Elijah Mohammed had Gathered millions of the dirty, immoral, filthy-mouthed, lazy and repulsive people and inspired them to the point where they are clean, sober, honest, hard-working, dignified, dedicated and admirable human beings in spite of their color. This is the guy Elijah and Malcolm had discussions with and invited to their rallies in 1961. With friends like that, hmmm? WORLD TOUR 1959 Malcolm X was clearly the human dynamo who turned this weird little cult around, barnstorming his way through American cities, charismatic, inspirational, and flattening audiences with rhetoric which this book unfailingly describes as "incendiary". He got them signing on the dotted line. Membership took off. He was the golden star and he was thought of as the likely successor to Elijah Muhammed himself. But things happened. In 1959 Malcolm toured the Middle East and Africa and realised to his astonishment that - Islam is not racist but inclusive, and there are many white Muslims - the Muslims he met had never heard of this Yakub's History thing and they clearly thought the the NOI was either profoundly heretical or not Islamic at all, just an American black sect which used Islamic terms here and there - Elijah Muhammed was therefore not a prophet at all This put him in a spot. What to do? And then ….. Elijah Muhammed – surprise! - decided that it was his cult so the very strict moral rules imposed on all the Muslims did not, in point of fact, apply to him, and he therefore fathered a series of babies with the young women who came to work at his head office in Chicago. The final tally was around eight or so. Now, every male cult leader does this, and – hmm – there are no women cult leaders, so I'm thinking that starting a cult is a way for some guys to meet girls. Lots of them. Other guys join rock bands because learning 4 chords is easier than inventing a theology. Malcolm was genuinely horrified when he found out about Elijah's girls. At the same time Elijah was getting really worried about Malcolm because Malcolm was getting more and more blatantly political. Then came the chickens remark. THE CHICKENS REMARK December 1st, 1963, Manhattan Center, New York City. Malcolm's speech is entitled "God's Judgement of White America". Elijah had ordered Malcolm not to mention the late JFK at all. Malcolm delivered the speech and was answering questions from the crowd. Eventually dallas came up and Malcolm said it was an instance of "the chickens coming home to roost". Well, so far, so ordinary. Malcolm characterised the US government as perpetrators of huge violence against its black citizens, not to mention increasingly against Vietnamese freedom fighters. So Malcolm just meant that ye shall reap what ye sow. But then he added : Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad, they've always made me glad. (Audience laughs appreciatively) This was so offensive that even Elijah Muhammed was offended, and he had no time for Kennedy. For the chickens remark Malcolm got a 90 day speaking ban from Elijah, and the 90 days ended up being forever. As Hank Williams put it, one word led to another, and the last word led to divorce. And this was astonishing because the NOI was Malcolm's whole world, where he ate, slept, got married, got paid, it was the roof over his head, it was everything. But he walked away from it. TOO MUCH PRESSURE After the split, which was a painful gradual process from December 63 to summer 64, Malcolm was in an extremely exposed position. Malcolm stood at the very middle of a complex set of crossroads between Islam and America, Africa and America, religion and politics, pacifism and violence. From 1963 to 1965 he was the very personification of these swirling torrents. What now? He was reforming his views on everything at the same time as being under the full-on media glare and scrutiny of the black population of America – and Africa too, the new independent African nations had not only heard of Malcolm, they were fascinated by him. Imagine, a black Muslim in America! And what a guy! So Malcolm ended up with everything on his plate. He was trying to act politically as the fulcrum between black America and black Africa, and religiously as the conduit between Muslim America and orthodox Islam. He was involved with an escalating war with NOI who were issuing death threats, veiled and not so veiled, on a daily basis. Oh, and he had no source of income, so he had to flog himself around the country making lecture after lecture, engagement after engagement. It was too much for anyone. He couldn't slow down until the NOI slowed him down. Malcolm X, 11 March, 1963 : There will be more violence than ever this year. … White people will be shocked when they discover that the passive little Negro they had known turns out to be a roaring lion. The whites had better understand this while there is still time. COMPLICATED OR CONFUSED OR BOTH The contradictions in Malcolm's thought at this time are dizzying – in 1964 he was the only black leader supporting right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater for president. At the same time the CIA were trying to figure out how to arrest him for sedition. MM sums this up beautifully: He was trying to appeal to so many different constituencies. He took different tones and attitudes depending on which group he was speaking to and often presented contradictory opinions only days apart. That he was not caught up in thiese contradictions more often owed to the fact that news travelled slowly across the country, that black politics was underreported, and that speeches were not regularly recorded. … he would alternately praise King and other civil rights leaders one day and ridicule them the next. LIFE AFTER DEATH Malcolm was a dazzling articulator of black anger and oppression, and not a clear political strategian or writer of manifestos. That would probably have come later. The organisations he created after the NOI split did not survive his death. He was the very embodiment of painful black struggle. He laid out the fate of black Americans for all to see. You take a few million black people in chains from Africa, you dump them into a foreign land, you work them in the fields, you breed them like cattle, and then you turn around and hate them for being in the country that you brought them to. Whilst at the same time you issue constitutions proclaiming your country to be the bastion of freedom for all. How about that? Breathtaking. This is what Malcolm explained in brutal language that everyone could understand. The Chickens remark and many others made Malcolm the most feared and hated black man in America in 63 and 64. But in 1987 Mayor Ed Koch renamed Lenox Avenue in Harlem Malcolm X Boulevard. In 1999 the US Postal Service put Malcolm on a stamp. He's almost revered now. He has had a spectacular posthumous career. [image] *** POSTSCRIPT READING BIOGRAPHIES IN THE AGE OF YOUTUBE In 1959 local New york City tv produced a series of documentaries about the NOI called The Hate that hate Produced. It became famous. It introduced the NOI to white America. And yes, it's on Youtube. So you have to stop reading and watch it because now you don't have to read about this stuff , you can watch the thing itself! Wow. While reading a biography of British author B S Johnson I found out he'd made a tv show called Fat Man on a Beach in 1973. Yes, that's there too. (well, it was....) While reading a book on the Velvet Underground I found out that before the Velvets were formed John Cale had appeared on the panel game show I've got a Secret. Yes, that's there too. Youtube is changing the way I read non-fiction. ...more |
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Dec 27, 2011
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Apr 07, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 0826321933
| 9780826321930
| 0826321933
| 4.01
| 1,900
| 1973
| Jan 01, 2000
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liked it
|
The time traveller stepped cautiously out of his machine and looked around the wide field. The day was bright, the country fecund. He permitted himsel
The time traveller stepped cautiously out of his machine and looked around the wide field. The day was bright, the country fecund. He permitted himself a smile. An elderly man was walking purposefully ahead of him. “Good day to you!” called the time traveller. “Not now, not now,” came the reply, “I have just this moment taken the life of my wife, her sister and three of her cousins, who were visiting. I am in a hurry now to take my own. I intend to swing shortly from yonder elm.” The time traveller reeled back in alarm. What was this? He cast his eyes about and noticed for the first time various dark forms dangling from the larger branches of the nearby trees. But then his eyes were taken up by an altogether gayer sight – it was a cheerful bonfire in the mid-distance. As he approached he noticed various persons frantically throwing water from buckets onto the flames and he realised it was a domestic house ablaze. “Come help us please!” said one, approaching. “Ralph Chase and his intire family are still within – a local boy known as an incendiary has done this for sure –“ and he handed the time traveller a bucket but suddenly sagged to the ground and began convulsing. A woman ran up and dragged the time traveller away from the moribund : “Keep clear, keep clear – he has the typhoid for sure!” The time traveller turned to her and in terrified tones demanded of her “What God Forsaken place is this?” “Why sir,” she said, “this is Black Ferry, Wisconsin, 1896.” ********* This book is : an affront to good taste a stone thrown into a pond a diatribe an indictment of human beings in general a patchwork quilt of blood and death an exercise in a particularly unpleasant form of voyeurism an original and extraordinary history essay a ripe example of the hipster’s fascination for the outre for its own sake a vision of Hell ******* What you get is : a) snippets from a couple of local newspapers from this small area of Wisconsin between 1885 and 1900. All the snippets are about suicide, murder, insanity and disease. Check the name of this book – that’s right. It’s not called “A Pleasant day Out in Wisconsin”. b) interpolated quotations from a couple of novels c) snippets from case studies of inmates at the Mendoza Asylum for the Insane. d) some bizarre photos by a local Wisconsin photographer, all posed, many featuring mannish women and men with frankly absurd tastes in facial hair – e.g. you shave all your face EXCEPT under your chin and your throat, so where your chin ends there’s a big hair explosion – hmm, attractive! Note to self – must try this. Oh yes, several photos of babies in coffins. e) pompous essays by the author/compiler and his professor pal Warren Susman (if my old professor had written a piece this patronising for my first book I’d have photoshopped his face onto some S&M porn and posted it on the university bulletin board). The final essay by Michael Lesy might actually be pretty good but you know what? By the time I got to it I’d had enough. ****** Random example 1: “A wild man is terrorising the people north of Grantsburg. He appears to be 35 years of age, has long black whiskers, is barefooted, has scarcely any clothes on him, and he carries a hatchet. He appeared at several farm houses and asked for something to eat. He eats ravenously, and when asked where he came from, points to the east. he secretes himself in the woods during the day and has the most bloodcurdling yells that have ever been heard in the neighbourhood.” Random example 2: “Henry Ehlers, a Milwaukee butcher, died from nosebleed. His nose had been bleeding for 9 days… He was 37 years of age and had been a great meat eater.” Random example 3: “The family of Henry Miller of Cedarburg is sorely afflicted. A 6 month old child died of diphtheria a week ago and now a 7 year old boy is dead. A few weeks previous, 2 children had died, all of the same disease. One child survives out of a family of 5 children and that too is down with the disease.” ********* There's a great American traditional song called Railroad Boy which in retrospect encapsulates the casual brutality of many of these jarring anecdotes of damage - I would have given the link for the great performance by Dylan and Joan Baez taken from Renaldo & Clara, but Youtube deleted that, so here's just the words : She went upstairs to make her bed And not one word to her mother said. Her mother she went upstairs too Saying, "Daughter, oh daughter, what's troublin' you?": "Oh mother, oh mother, I cannot tell That railroad boy that I love so well. He courted me my life away And now at home will no longer stay." "There is a place in yonder town Where my love goes and he sits him down. And he takes that strange girl on his knee And he tells to her what he won't tell me." Her father he came home from work Sayin', "Where is my daughter, she seems so hurt" He went upstairs to give her hope An' he found her hangin' by a rope. He took his knife and he cut her down And on her bosom these words he found: "Go dig my grave both wide and deep, Put a marble stone at my head and feet, And on my breast, put a snow white dove To warn the world that I died of love ***** Although in Wisconsin in the 1890s they were dying of a whole lot more things than mere love. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 28, 2010
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Dec 30, 2010
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Nov 19, 2010
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| 0452275660
| 9780452275669
| 0452275660
| 3.86
| 5,672
| Apr 12, 1971
| Apr 01, 1996
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really liked it
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Governing emotion : white-hot anger Underneath that : confusion (for the characters, for the reader) Style : I’m EL Doctorow and it’s 1971 and society i Governing emotion : white-hot anger Underneath that : confusion (for the characters, for the reader) Style : I’m EL Doctorow and it’s 1971 and society is caving in and I’m gonna put anything I like in my novel, chunks of political analysis, satires of hippy revolution, childhood memoir, denunciations of the old left, lists of candy bars I once ate. And I'm gonna drop from first person to third person and back again sometimes in mid-sentence. Live with it, baby! This is the way novels are these days,you got to write each one like it might be the last novel ever. So this is a fictionalised version of the story of the Rosenbergs who were executed for treason in 1953. ELD changes all the names and details around slightly. I would say it’s made up of 30% Daniel’s memories of childhood and the great dramas playing around the heads of him and his sister; 40% the story of the mother & father; and 30% Daniel’s present day life & times - he is now a hippy revolutionary and his sister is in a mental hospital. ELD's daniel is a very nasty young man. You can see why he might have a few chips on his shoulder, but really, he seems quite close to being unbalanced. At many points in this book I wouldn’t have minded throwing the switch myself, so long as uber-angst Daniel was in the chair. This sourest, most rancid of political novels disgorges the most stupid parts of the red scare 50s and the radical hippy 60s into a blender and the gunk we are then served with is poisonous, it reeks with all the least attractive aspects of people, of American people, no one comes out of this shitstorm looking pretty. I had a hard time liking this book. I liked it in short sharp surges, there are sweeps of bristling bellowing rhetoric, but these are usually felched into a rictus of pain by the time you turn the page. If anyone smiles in these 386 pages it’s because someone has died. It’s all a bit angst. Daniel has angst in his pangst. AUDACIOUS AMERICANS I like to say to anyone in earshot that the difference between American and British art is that we British have the history but those Americans have the geography. It’s one of my sayings. They have the broad sweep of the present, to match the broad sweep of their land - we have the intricate knowledge of the past. Or : they have the confidence from which we have now withdrawn. Or : they now have the empire which we relinquished. It’s kind of true – look at the fantastic boldness of some American authors with their huge projects to write out the secret (read “real” or “underground”) history of America – DeLillo in Underworld, Ellroy in his trilogies, going back further Vidal in his presidents series. British authors just don’t do that. The Book of Daniel falls into this bold brash genre. So I admire it. I also admire the audacity of ELD – right at the end, when, in classic Hollywood fashion, our flawed hero Daniel is chasing down our deadly villain, the government stooge Mindish, he suddenly stops the narrative for a six page essay on the cultural ramifications of Disneyland. I also admire the large areas which aren’t explored in this novel, like Daniel’s awful treatment of his wife. Loose wires hang out all over the place. PAUSE FOR THOUGHT This novel’s present is 1967, twelve years after the execution of Daniel’s parents. In the 20th century the speed of cultural change could be breakneck, and often skews my own view of history. The Red Scare was 1947-57 roughly – but a mere eight years later the hippies began and by 1968 everything looked completely different. Within the 1960s, the changes were hectic, irresponsible, giving us all the bends - Beatles yeah yeah moptops in 1963 turning to druggy beardy mystics by 1969; things were common by 1970 which couldn’t have been conceived of in 1960. 12 years separates the past and the present of this novel but it seems like 50. It’s disorientating. Things don’t seem to move so fast these days, or is it me? STARS It’s not easy to like. You end it feeling like you’ve been yelled at for several hours. Your head is ringing. Four stars for ambition and for getting the thing done. Two stars only for enjoyability. I should compromise with three, then. Four stars it is. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 12, 2010
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Oct 02, 2010
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Jun 29, 2010
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| 0312241356
| 9780312241353
| 0312241356
| 4.38
| 27,974
| Nov 01, 1987
| Apr 09, 2000
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really liked it
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A great and compelling book, but somehow, even in Reagan's America, it's hard to go along with the conspiracy theorists who make out that the governme
A great and compelling book, but somehow, even in Reagan's America, it's hard to go along with the conspiracy theorists who make out that the government was merrily fiddling away while Rome burned. I mean, look at the response which people got when they wanted to close the bath houses.
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Notes are private!
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not set
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not set
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Oct 31, 2007
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