Category Archives: Books

Top Five (and other) Cold War Movies

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The Spy Who ... (Richard Burton)

Richard Burton as Alec Leamas in “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”

Bryan Caskey has drawn up his Top Five Cold War Movies over at his blog, and I feel compelled to answer it. My perspective is a little different from his, because I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, giving me not only different cultural touchstones, but a different feel for the Cold War itself.

Here’s my Top Five:

  1. The Spy Who Came in from The Cold — This defines the genre. Starts and ends at the Berlin Wall. A lot of bad movies were made from good books in the ’60s, but this wasn’t one of them. It did a great job of capturing the atmosphere, the moral ambiguity and the deception-within-deception-within-deception plotline of LeCarre’s book.
  2. Dr. Strangelove — I was torn between this and Fail-Safe, which was the same story without the comedy. But this was such an awesome piece of film-making, it had to go on the list. Strangelove got us to laugh at the things that caused our hair to stand on end in Fail-Safe. The link is to my favorite scene: “Now, then, Dimitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb…”
  3. Our Man in Havana — I’m going for satirical again with this spoof of the spy genre. Both Alec Guinness and Ernie Kovacs. How do you beat that? Based on Graham Greene’s most enjoyable “entertainment” (which is what he called his less serious novels), which inspired le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama.
  4. The Mouse That Roared — Yes, I’m going for the more obscure reference because Barry in High Fidelity (the ultimate authority for the science of Top Five lists) would sneer at any Top Five list that didn’t have one that no one else would think of. I’ll even admit that the movie wasn’t very good — although I enjoyed the book. This is about a tiny country with a medieval military capability that becomes the world’s greatest power by stealing a Doomsday Machine from the U.S. For Strangelove fans, this also has Peter Sellers in multiple roles.
  5. The Manchurian Candidate — Paranoia is a huge part of what the Cold War was about, and this is the classic of that genre.

Another Five, in case you’d like a Top Ten:

  1. Seven Days in May — In a way not really about the Cold War, except for the paranoia thing.
  2. Fail-Safe — I initially had this in the Top Five, trying to be cool by picking on the less-obvious choice. I was going to say that “Awesome as it was, Strangelove was more about a sort of smartass 60s cultural sensibility than it was about the way real people felt about nuclear annihilation.” But I changed my mind.
  3. The Ipcress File — Perhaps the all-time best Michael Caine vehicle, based on Len Deighton’s very best novel. Deighton’s book is breezily ironic, very hip, yet far more realistic than Bond.
  4. The Lives of Others — A look at what life was like on the other side of the curtain.
  5. WarGames — More of a movie about the then-new phenomenon of computer hackers than about the Cold War, but it still fits in the genre. Ferris Bueller meets Fail-Safe.

Also-rans, in no particular order:

  • The Third Man — This might have made the list, but I think it’s more about postwar black-marketeering than about the Cold War proper.
  • Stripes — Great fun, but too silly to make the Top Five list.
  • The Right Stuff — Not what you think of as “Cold War,” maybe, but what was it all about? Trying to prevent the godless Russkies from being able to drop nukes on us from space, like rocks from a highway overpass. An amazing job of turning a book that is mostly about the narration into an engaging film.
  • Red Dawn — A high school kid’s fantasy of World War III. I mean, wouldn’t every adolescent boy like to see the boredom of school interrupted by a shooting war in which he is the hero?
  • Twilight’s Last Gleaming — Didn’t we see Burt Lancaster play this character before, in “Seven Days in May”?
  • The Quiet American — The jaded European view of Americans as blundering do-gooders.
  • Blast from the Past — Bomb-shelter anxieties transformed into romantic comedy.
  • 2010 — The sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, this one wrongly guessed that we’d still be goin’ toe-to-toe with the Russkies nine years later. Best parts: Both Dave and Hal show up.
Ernie Kovacs playing minibottle chess in "Our Man in Havana."

Ernie Kovacs playing minibottle checkers in “Our Man in Havana.”

 

Vincent Sheheen kicks off 2014 campaign, apparently…

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sheheen book

This came in about an hour ago:

Sheheen Kicks Off “Back on Track” Tour
State Senator will discuss ideas for moving South Carolina forward and his new book “The Right Way” in three-week statewide tour
Rock Hill, SC. – Today, state Sen. Vincent Sheheen kicks off the Palmetto State “Back on Track” tour at Sun City in Rock Hill to rollout his new book “The Right Way” and discuss his ideas for how to move South Carolina forward with local residents and leaders around the state.
“This short book is not meant to propose solutions to all of our state’s problems. It’s a revolt against the status quo. This book proposes ideas for us to consider and debate to try to get our state back on the right footing and shed the inanities of the past few years,” said Sen. Vincent Sheheen. “More than anything, this book of ideas is an attempt to promote more rational political discussion and policy making. Ultimately, we will still need committed citizens and leadership on many fronts to make it so. I look forward to meeting these leaders in the coming weeks and discussing how we will all move forward together.”
The Back on Track Tour will run from March 11th through March 30th holding lectures at universities, listening sessions with local families and leaders, and press conferences and discussions with media about the vision laid out in his book for creating jobs, improving education, restructuring the government, and creating a more prosperous future for the people and businesses of the Palmetto state. The tour kicks off today at noon in Rock Hill, before making stops in Conway, Myrtle Beach, Florence, Columbia, Aiken, Charleston, Fairfield, Beaufort, Greenville, and Spartanburg throughout the next three weeks.
Sen. Sheheen’s book is free and available online here, or as a hard copy at each of the event stops on the Back on Track tour.
Below is a selection of key quotes from Sen. Sheheen’s book, “The Right Way: Getting the Palmetto State Back on Track.”
We must do better for South Carolina… the right way
“This book is not about me. It’s about our South Carolina—a South Carolina we know can exist if we join together in a common vision with leaders who actually care about our state. We are better than what our government has looked like in recent history. We have been better before. We deserve better now. It’s up to us to engage and change. We must do it again…the right way.” — p. 110
“Somehow, however, we have let the naysayers gain the upper hand over the last couple of decades in South Carolina. You know who I am talking about—the people who tell us what we can’t do instead of what we can do. These are folks who believe nothing will ever get better and that things just are what they are. I am not one of these people. I do not believe that the South Carolina I know is made up of people like that either. From Camden to Charleston, Aiken to Horry and Due West to Denmark, the people I know and meet in South Carolina believe we can do better than what we have experienced in South Carolina’s recent government. In fact, we must.” — p. 108
“But we also need more than just ideas. We need ACTION—action that turns the status quo of the negativists on their heads. It is almost too late. But together, we still have time. If we don’t quickly get South Carolina moving again, our children and grandchildren will pay the price for decades to come.” — p. 109
Total change needed
“We have suffered embarrassment after embarrassment caused by our leaders’ unethical behavior and boneheaded statements and we have become the butt of late night television jokes all too frequently.  This downward spiral in our government should surprise no one. Why? Because we have elected leaders who proclaim a belief that government is always part of the problem. Once elected, they prove their theory correct by making our state’s government a dysfunctional embarrassment that is incapable of efficiently meeting the demands of core government functions.”  — pp. 1-2
“Future success for South Carolina’s workers—as well as the entire state—requires more education, not less.  Unfortunately, South Carolina’s recent leaders don’t have a good record in making smart investments in education to ensure that our children will have the training they need to get the better-paying jobs of the future. I believe it’s time we turn that abysmal record on its head.  Simply put: How can the students of today expect to hold the jobs of tomorrow if they don’t have enough knowledge? — p. 8
“Accountability in South Carolina’s government has been missing for more than a decade. In the end, a government can be successful and accountable regardless of deficiencies in its structure if it has strong, responsible and effective leaders.  However in South Carolina, a combination of ineffective leaders and confusing structure has led to our government being ranked one of the most dysfunctional and unaccountable in the nation.” — p. 27
“I am not opposed to healing our government incrementally.  I am, however, skeptical that our current leaders will finish the job with that approach. I believe that when a government has reached such a level of dysfunction and disintegration as South Carolina’s, it is time to return the power to the people.” — p. 48
“Through weak leadership in recent times and a governmental system confusing to virtually everyone, South Carolina’s government has arrived at a low point. We have a choice:  To continue with the same poor leadership and same poor system, or break with the past and make dramatic change.  We can’t afford to wait on current crop of political leaders to make the changes our state needs and deserves. We must take things into our own hands and force change. Either through incremental or dramatic change, we must alter the trajectory of South Carolina’s future. My children and yours deserve our best efforts.” — p. 50
Forward, to a path to prosperity
“One of the greatest obstacles to robust economic growth in South Carolina is our state’s broken and dysfunctional tax system. Furthermore, a special-interest-controlled tax code means that general taxpayers will end up with fewer core services that they say they want. Sure, in good times of budget surpluses, politicians will spread the wealth to make all appear rosy. But all they’ll be doing is bandaging a broken system, which will unravel once again when they cut what they recently added during downturns. It’s a seesaw system of government that leaves us all up in the air.” — p. 54
“The goal of tax reform should not be to raise taxes. To achieve true economic success, our state must reform how it taxes goods so that it can reduce the rate for everyone. That’s something we should all be for.” — p. 67
“Like most South Carolinians, I believe in hard work. I believe we should expect everyone who is physically able to have a job. I don’t believe in handouts. But I also expect that our state government will do all it can to ensure that opportunities exist for our citizens to find a job. It’s in all of our interests for the state to provide a hand-up in the form of job training, economic development, good education and support for small businesses.” — p. 85
“What is excluded from most local economic development offices’ services is support to startup companies and entrepreneurs.  This reflects, in part, a lack of expertise in the area but also recognition that the failure rate of these types of companies is high. A handful of groups around the state provide services to startups and entrepreneurs, but they are the exception rather than the rule. The S.C. Department of Commerce has a department that provides access to resources for small businesses, but there is little affirmative effort by the state to assist small business.” — p. 98
“Our state needs a multipronged approach to saving our rural areas and small towns. Failure to meet this challenge will doom many communities to a low standard of living and even non-existence. North Carolina has met this challenge head-on and invested heavily in the strategies and infrastructure for its rural areas. We should do the same.” — p. 102
“Our leaders are pricing the middle class out of a college education. The alternative has become hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt incurred by our future workforce. This is a dumb policy. We should dedicate a decent portion of future budget growth to stabilizing college tuition. And when the state funds higher education in a reasonable manner, colleges and universities should be required to keep tuition increases low.” — p. 106
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Spring, trying to arrive

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azaleas

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”

— A Moveable Feast

Just a couple of days back, I noticed how the azaleas next to my driveway were budding, and even blooming in some places. Below, you see a tree blooming in my backyard.

Anyway, I wonder if it’s going to last, or is this like the false springs in Paris that Hemingway wrote of? If the latter, it will be a shame, but I won’t take it as hard as he did. I don’t see the fall the way he did, either. I feel like things are coming alive when the leaves turn and the air turns brisk.

One thing I really don’t like about the spring, especially this one. I really resent that I’ll be robbed of an hour tonight. I don’t like anything about Daylight Savings Time, and it really bugs me that it’s taking up more and more of the year…

spring

Yes, public schools should teach Bible as literature

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An op-ed in the WSJ today made the case for putting the Bible into the public school curriculum, as a foundational work (or rather, body of works) of Western civilization. The authors were educated in Europe and were taught the Bible as a matter of course. But that reckons without the reflexive horror the suggestion of doing so engenders in this country:

Teaching the Bible is of course a touchy subject. One can’t broach it without someone barking “separation of church and state” and “forcing religion down my throat.”

Yet the Supreme Court has said it’s perfectly OK for schools to do so, ruling in 1963 (Abington School District v. Schempp) that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as a part of a secular (public school) program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court understood that we’re not talking about religion here, and certainly not about politics. We’re talking about knowledge. The foundations of knowledge of the ancient world—which informs the understanding of the modern world—are biblical in origin. Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president known more as a cigar-chomping Rough Rider than a hymn-signing Bible-thumper, once said: “A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.”

I agree entirely, totally apart from all the phrases with which scripture has enriched the language, or the fact that Shakespeare makes 1,200 biblical references.

I think there are other things we should have to read as well. I’ve always felt sort of ignorant that I’ve never read the Iliad, preferably in the original Greek. But that’s peripheral, compared to having a thorough understanding of such allusions as Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, Jonah and Judas Iscariot. Those are basic.

And it’s not just the stories or the language. As an overview of different forms of ancient literature (poetry, allegory, history, etc.) it’s a treasure trove.

Before someone misunderstands me — nothing that I’ve said gives anyone any reason to, but Kulturkampf in this society being emotional rather than rational, someone will — I’m not an advocate of mandatory prayer in public schools. Although people should be (and are) free to pray there as well as anywhere else.

The authors of this piece, if anything, underestimate the objections such a suggestion will meet. For instance, they neglect to anticipate the objection that other religions’ texts, say the Bhagavad Gita, should be given the same status in the K-12 curriculum. But of course, that work is not foundational to western culture. It’s a great subject for upper-division college electives, but there’s no more reason to make it part of everyone’s education than, say, Kerouac’s Dharma Bums as opposed to Huck Finn. One is enrichment; the other is basic.

Anyway, since these folks brought up the subject, I say yeah: Put Genesis and the rest in there with Shakespeare. They are still reading Shakespeare in the schools, aren’t they? If not, I give up…

The utter pettiness of public life in our times

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lincoln

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln fretted that there was no opportunity for his generation to accomplish anything important; gone were the days in which the founders had risen to the great challenge of establishing the nation.

Here’s an early passage from Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which I finally finished reading a couple of nights ago:

… Lincoln had expressed his concern that his generation had been left a meager yield after the “field of glory” was harvested by the founding fathers. They were a “forest of giant oaks,” he said, who face the “task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land,” and to build “upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.” Their destinies were inseparably linked” with the experiment of providing the world,” a practical demonstration” of “the capability of a people to govern themselves. It they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time.”

Because their experiment succeeded, Lincoln observed, thousands “won their deathless names in making it so.” What was left for the men of his generation to accomplish?…

Of course, Lincoln was profoundly mistaken:

In 1854, the wheel of history turned. A train of events that mobilized the antislavery North resulted in the formation of the Republican Party and ultimately provided Lincoln’s generation with a challenge equal to or surpassing that of the founding fathers.

Every day that he was in office, Lincoln and his administration wrestled mightily with questions of ultimate important and great moral weight. Until very late in the war, the great issues — whether the United States would continue to exist, and whether all its people would be free — were in great doubt.

Along the way, he dealt with a great deal of human pettiness — from the criminal uselessness of General McClellan to the scheming, naked ambition of Salmon Chase, from the everyday grubbing of officeseekers to personal disputes that threatened the government’s ability to function — but his focus, and that of most of those around him, was on the towering issues of the day.

And in spite of all, the challenges were met, masterfully. By Lincoln, whom I am more convinced than ever is the most remarkable and able individual ever to hold the office of president, but also by ordinary people who rose to do extraordinary things.

All the time I was reading that book, I kept thinking how unbelievably petty our public life is today. And I’m not just talking about the partisan bickering that I decry here so regularly. It’s the things that we squabble about that are so depressing.

The whole time I was reading that book — and I read it slowly, over a period of months, mostly at the dinner table, a few pages at a time — the great crisis of our time was the “fiscal cliff.” That precipice was created by our utter inability to deal with the most routine concerns, those of financing the government. And of course, we have a series of unresolved conflicts of the same nature that we must deal with this year, since the can has only been kicked, and kicked feebly, down the road.

In her column this weekend, Peggy Noonan wrote the following, in another of her passages finding fault with President Obama:

All the famous criticisms of him are true: He has no talent for or interest in sustained, good-faith negotiations, he has no real sense of alarm about the great issue of the day, America’s debt….

Really? That’s “the great issue of the day”? How mind-numbingly appalling.

And perhaps she’s right. Politicians in Washington, and all those who ape them in the hinterlands, certainly act as though that, and attendant issues, are the great matters of our day.

But here’s the thing: There are no great moral considerations involved here, people. Figuring out what it costs to run the government and how to levy the taxes to pay for it are matters that a middling accountant could work out in a day, and the issue would be behind us. How much to tax, how much to spend are indeed debatable issues. But they are not issues of right and wrong. They are unworthy of anyone’s passion.

No, I don’t long for us to be engaged in a mighty war to settle whether this nation, or any like it, will continue to exist. I don’t want to see more that 600,000 of my fellow citizen die in settling some momentous issue.I don’t lament, as Lancelot did in a time of peace in The Once and Future King, that “We don’t see many arrows thrilling in people’s hearts nowadays.”

I would just like to see us recognize that petty issues are petty issues, and resolve them, and move on. And no, I don’t consider trillions of dollars to be small considerations; I’m just saying that these issues are eminently solvable, with just a modicum of reasonable behavior on the part of all parties. I’m saying that the “drama” of “fiscal cliffs” and debt ceilings is entirely contrived, artificial and unnecessary.

Getting rid of slavery — now that was difficult. It was the great unresolved conflict that had dogged the nation since its founding. The issue could not be resolved without tearing the nation apart and putting it back together again. The solutions accepted as fact in 1865 were unthinkable in 1860. (Yes, they were “thinkable” in that abolitionists advocated them; but it was politically impossible to implement them until the height of the war.)

We shouldn’t need a national existential crisis to solve the problem of balancing the national checkbook. We should just be able to do it, and move on.

First-person shooter: What games did Loughner play?

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This is a post I wrote back in early 2011, and didn’t publish. Recent discussions of gun violence bring it back to the fore, so here it is…

In my Monday Wall Street Journal (the only edition I received after coming back from England until late Wednesday, which was really frustrating), I read the following about the Arizona shooter:

“All he did was play video games and play music,” said Tommy Marriotti, a high school friend.

And that got me to wondering: What sort of games did he play? Since initially reading that, I see he recently played Earth Empires, a strategy game. But I suspect he has at least at some time — maybe back in high school, maybe some other time — played another sort of game.

I find myself wondering whether he was into first-person shooter games…

I have two reasons for wondering that. First, there are the theories of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (ret.). Col. Grossman is the foremost expert in the field of “killology,” a term he coined. He wrote a fascinating book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, which I recommend. It discusses the psychology of killing, mostly within the context of war. He explains that for most of military history, as long as we’ve had projectile weapons in the hands of the average soldier, the overwhelming majority of soldiers did not shoot to kill. Frequently, they didn’t fire their weapons at all, and when they did, they tended to fire over the heads of their enemies — to engage in a sort of threat display, rather than use deadly force.

They did this because for most humans, the reluctance to kill is deep and strong.

The U.S. military, realizing this (on the basis of extensive studies during and after WWII), started conditioning that reluctance out of soldiers starting with the Vietnam era (or perhaps a little earlier; it’s been awhile since I’ve read it). Soldiers started to be trained to quickly acquire the human target and fire accurately before thinking about it too much. The result is that the U.S. military is, soldier for soldier, the most deadly fighting force in the world, perhaps in history. (Probably the most dramatic demonstration of this was the battle of Mogadishu in 1993, in which elite soldiers faced mobs of Somali militias with a tendency to fire randomly and wildly with their AK-47s — the result was 18 dead Americans, but about 1,000 dead Somalis.) But soldiers who shoot now often pay a profound psychological cost later, and that was what Col. Grossman was motivated to study.

He has also ventured into related peacetime phenomena, such as the popularity and increasing sophistication of FPS games, which train the reflexes of the kids who play them to shoot quickly and accurately, without reluctance. He asserts that it’s not a bit surprising that we have Columbines given the ubiquity of such games. Kids have had conditioned out of them the hesitation that affected trained soldiers through most of history.

You may say Col. Grossman exaggerates. And indeed, some experts are far more phlegmatic about such games. I don’t think he does, but that’s because of the other reason I was interested: I’ve played these games myself. A decade or so ago, I had a copy of an early version of Wolfenstein. The violence was non-stop, but it was also cartoonish and unconvincing, only a step or two beyond Space Invaders. Now, it’s different…

Two years ago, I got myself a copy of Call of Duty: World at War. I was fascinated by the premise, which was to put the player in realistic scenarios from the Pacific and Eastern fronts in the Second World War. (Some of them weirdly realistic. When I saw some of the scenes from the Peleliu campaign in “The Pacific” recently, I thought, I’ve been there… It was weird.) But I was completely unprepared for two things: First, the realism. When I first booted up the game on my computer (and I had to get a more sophisticated video card to run it, even though my computer was almost new), I thought I was watching a video prologue — I didn’t realize the game had started. I couldn’t believe the graphics were that realistic, that high-res.

Second, the emotional manipulation, which was stunning. There are two story lines: In one, you are a U.S. Marine named Miller, fighting your way across the Pacific. In the other, you are a Red Army soldier. The designers of the game came up with their own way of overcoming any reluctance the player might have to shooting the enemy. The Marine scenario begins with Miller being a prisoner of the Japanese. As Miller, you watch the Japanese torture and kill your buddy, before one of them moves toward you with a knife, prepared to serve you in the same way — before he is stopped by the commandos who have come to rescue you. Your rescuers hand you a weapon, and by this point, you’re expected to know what to do with it.

In the start of the Russian scenario, you are lying still among dead and dying comrades in Stalingrad. As you lie there (the game won’t let you move at first), you watch German soldiers step around you, casually shooting the wounded as you watch helplessly. Somehow they overlook you. As the enemy moves away, a grizzled Red Army sergeant who was also playing dead whispers to you to follow him, and he will show you how to get your vengeance on the fascists, who, as he keeps reminding you, are raping your homeland. He hands you a sniper rifle…

Creepy, huh? At this point, you’d like me to tell you I didn’t go on and play the game, but I did. I’ve played it all the way through a number of times. It’s very seductive, because it’s challenging. But I wouldn’t argue if you were to say, “Yes, of course it is — like other forms of pornography.” I expect those of you who’ve never played such games will have all sorts of critical things to say about me for playing it, and I won’t argue with those assertions, either. I know how it looks. When my wife enters the room when I’m playing, I hastily shut it down. Because she is my conscience.

But that’s not the really creepy thing: Over time, I played the game less. I had mastered the easier levels, and the harder ones were just ridiculous. Also, well, I’ve tried to spend less of my life in nonproductive pursuits. But a number of months ago, I got curious about something: I had never played the “multiplayer” option, in which you fight against other players over the Internet. So I tried that.

And I discovered that either the world is full of unsuspected super-soldiers, with reflexes that are not to be believed, or there are a lot of geeks out there who spend WAY too much time getting ridiculously good at playing these games. The latter, of course, is most likely. And hardly surprising. But I discovered one thing that positively sent chills down my spine. I quickly accepted that I could not survive more than a few seconds against people whose reflexes were so finely honed to aggressive play of the game. Fine — I have trouble with basketball, too. And I figured that the guys who spend a lot of time on these games are 20-something, and an old guy like me can’t hope to keep up. But what got me was when I encountered a few players who had activated the feature that enabled them to speak with each other in real time as they shot and stabbed their way across the landscape.

The thing that got me was when I heard their voices.

They were little boys. They sounded like they were about 10. And they were very, very efficient, hyperaggressive and unhesitating virtual killers.

I quit playing at that point.

Anyway, that’s why I wonder — what sorts of games did Loughner play?

What do YOU think of John Brown, all these years later?

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I used to see this original mural in the state capitol in Topeka when I supervised the people who covered state politics for the Wichita paper. It seems to me to sum up Brown pretty well.

I’ve learned a lot of new things, and been reminded of things I once knew, in reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the latter part of which inspired the movie “Lincoln.” (I’m not nearly to that part yet; last night I read up through Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861.)

One of them was the radical differences of opinion that existed about John Brown at the time. From my 21st-century perspective, I tend to think of who Brown was and what he meant as being a pretty settled matter. It is in my mind, anyway. But of course, at the time, he was perhaps the most extreme litmus test of attitudes ever to occur in U.S. history.

Today, I perused a review of another book, The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, which consists of contemporary writings about Brown from authors including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher, Jefferson Davis, Herman Melville, Stephen Douglas, Louisa May Alcott, Victor Hugo and Karl Marx.

Emerson saw Brown as a Christ-like “saint” and Douglass hailed him as “our noblest American hero.” His detractors saw him as “a deranged fanatic whose violent actions made civil war inevitable.”

I always thought of him as a deranged fanatic who just happened to be right about slavery. What he did was inexcusable, however laudable his motivations.

What the Union did in the Civil War was justified not only by the nobility of the cause, but by the fact that it was a case of the duly constituted authority of the country taking action against violent insurrection. But what Brown did was itself violent, murderous insurrection, not in any way supportable under the rule of law, and therefore unjustifiable. (There’s another measurement suggested by Just War theory, which is, Were the goals of his actions achievable? His most decidedly were not.)

A person can have the right idea on a burning issue and still be mad. A person can have noble goals and do despicable things in the name of them. To me, that’s always summed up Brown.

Your thoughts?

Pride and Prejudice and Scandal

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The imprudent Lydia Bennet (actress Sirena Dib) hanging with some of the young officers from the regiment...

Having appeared so recently in the SC Shakespeare Company’s production of “Pride and Prejudice,” I particularly enjoyed the ending of Maureen Dowd’s column about the Petraeus scandal:

The military might want to have its future stars read Jane Austen as well as Grant and Rommel. “Pride and Prejudice” is full of warnings about the dangers of young ladies with exuberant, flirtatious, “unguarded and imprudent” manners visiting military regiments and preening in “all the glories of the camp.”

Such folly and vanity, the ever wise Elizabeth Bennet cautioned, can lead to censure and disgrace.

We knew this was coming, didn’t we?

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After the 2008 election, Jim DeMint and others cried that the reason Republicans lost is that they just weren’t right-wing enough, and they should never have nominated an iconoclast like John McCain.

It was patent nonsense, but the GOP listened, and so we got the Tea Party madness, and Nikki Haley, and Sarah Palin as a national celebrity, and a presidential nominating process that a year ago was letting the flake of the week take turns leading the pack.

It was inevitable, of course, that someone would say after Tuesday that despite all that saturation in ideology, Romney’s problem was that he just wasn’t right-wing enough (and remember, four years ago, Romney was the preferred candidate of people like DeMint). And in this release, someone did:

The Real Reason Romney Lost

Now that Mitt Romney lost to one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history, the question many are asking is why?

Political pundits on the Left and Right are claiming that Romney appealed too much to the “extreme Right fringe” and was not “moderate enough.”  The truth is that the exact opposite is true.

It is virtually impossible to win a national presidential election without your base on election day as 1976, 1992, 1996, and 2008 all demonstrated. Unfortunately, the GOP elites thought the pro-family/pro-life Christian base would hold their proverbial noses and vote for their candidate regardless.  They were wrong!

Fast forward to 2012 and many of us warned that if the GOP once again nominated an establishment approved liberal like Romney that it would assure 4 more years of the Obama in the White House since, again, it’s virtually impossible to win without your base on election day.

But once again, the elites who run the GOP (Reince Priebus, Karl Rove, The Bushies, the folks over at Fox News, the Weekly Standard and National Review) rammed yet another establishment liberal RINO down our throats who was, from the very beginning, destined for defeat.

Obama’s base turned out Tuesday night.  Romney’s  didn’t.  And why should they have?  After all, in just the past few months, Romney did virtually everything possible to snub the very same Evangelical conservative GOP “Values Voters” base ( whose support he would need in every one of the key swing states he lost last night) by:

  • Refusing to sign the Susan B. Anthony and Personhood U.S.A pro-life pledges.
  • Reaffirming his opposition to bans on homosexual scoutmasters.
  • Opposing 100% pro-life, pro-family, across the board conservative Senatorial candidate, Todd Akin.
  • Running pro-abortion ads in key pro-life swing states.
  • Stating that “abortion legislation” and Chick Fill-A was not “part of his agenda.”

Santorum was right when he said that Romney was the “worst Republican in the country to run against Obama.”

Having lost his own senate re-election bid by 18 points in 2006 by snubbing his own base (by supporting uber-liberal Arlen Specter over conservative primary challenger Pat Toomey), Santorum was all too familiar with what happens when your base stays home on election day.

The GOP elites should have listened to Santorum.

So, how do we stop perpetually repeating this mistake every 4 years you ask?  Simple.

Christian and conservative leaders and grassroots citizens must make it clear that we will, under no circumstances, compromise our core moral and spiritual beliefs.  We will not support godless liberals like Romney for public office no matter how many time the liberal GOP inside-the-beltway elites tell us our 100% pro-life, pro-marriage, pro- rule of law Constitutional conservative Christian candidate isn’t “electable.”

When we set the standard based on God’s authoritative Word and tell those running to represent us that if they don’t meet that standard that they will not get our support, I believe we will get candidates who truly represent us.

There are obviously millions of Christians and conservatives who don’t subscribe to the utilitarian-secular-humanist and anti-Biblical “lesser of two evils” construct and they refused to cast a vote for the most radically pro-abortion, pro-homosexual governor in the history of the Republic regardless of who his opponent was.

If the GOP is serious about reversing course in the next election they may want to run actual candidates whom the base will actually turn out for on election day.

Because, as Romney proved, you don’t win without your base on election day…

That email, by the way, came from one Annie Fischer, who appeared to be writing on behalf of one Gregg Jackson, author of a book entitled We Won’t Get Fooled Again.

But despite that title, there appear to be certain people who will keep getting fooled over and over, continuing to believe unlikely propositions despite evidence to the contrary.

Thomas Jefferson as unrepentant slaveholder

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The usual take on the man best known for writing that “All men are created equal” has been that he owned slaves, but… after which you choose your excuse:

  • He was really conflicted about it.
  • He just didn’t think freeing them would be practical.
  • He was a particularly benevolent master.
  • It’s not fair to judge someone who was born into that system, and knew no other, by modern ethical standards.

The excuses may bear revisiting in light of a new book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, byHenry Wiencek. Here’s an excerpt from a review of the book this morning in The Wall Street Journal:

The strongest sections of the book track Mr. Wiencek’s close reading of Jefferson’s estate records, where he found a coldblooded taskmaster who ruthlessly exploited child labor and overworked his slaves as a matter of course. Jefferson sometimes countenanced brutal punishment, including the whipping of boys as young as 10 or 11 in his highly profitable nail factory, “whose profits paid the mansion’s grocery bills,” Mr. Wiencek writes. Despite Jefferson’s occasional assertions that slavery would one day wither away, he never lifted a finger to weaken it as an institution, even when implored to do so by friends and allies who regarded slavery as an affront to the values for which patriots had fought the Revolutionary War.

In his youth, Jefferson did hold antislavery convictions. And in his earliest draft of the Declaration of Independence, he may well have had slaves in mind when he declared that all men were created equal.(Southerners were sufficiently worried that they tried unsuccessfully to have the word “men” changed to “freemen.”) By 1784, however, in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he expressed in graceful but cringe-inducing prose a deep personal distaste for blacks, who, he asserted, smelled wrong, copulated with apes in Africa, and were incapable of intellectual achievement.

Whatever moral ambivalence he may have felt toward the institution of slavery he overcame when he sat down and did the numbers for Monticello. In 1792, he calculated precisely what his slaves were worth. Mr. Wiencek writes: “What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved children were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest.” To intimates, Jefferson described slavery matter-of-factly as a good investment strategy, advising one friend that if his family had cash to spare, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes.”…

Actually, I was a bit surprised that Jefferson even handled the books for his estate. I supposed he followed the practice of the landed gentry of having a “man of business” deal with all that. I had supposed he was detached from the enterprises that gave him his wealth, devoting all his time to politics, science and music. I had read that he was a terrible money manager, embodying the Southern planter’s typical indifference to debt, spending above his means on books, scientific instruments and other things that scratched his intellectual itch.

I supposed that, to paraphrase John Travolta (on being a loan shark) in “Get Shorty,” he was never that into it. But supposing he remained above the details of running his estate was just my way of offering him another excuse, I guess.

Mr. Wiencek’s premise seems to be that he was not only his own man of business, but a particularly hard-eyed one, especially on the subject of slavery.

Not that I was ever prepared to give him a pass on that. There are a number of reasons why, among the Founders, I have always preferred John Adams to Jefferson, and have resented that Jefferson was in their day, and still is, more celebrated and revered. One of those reasons was that Adams was adamantly opposed to slavery, while Jefferson, high-minded words aside, was a major practitioner of that evil.

This book should give us all, including those of you who admire Mr. Jefferson more than I do, something new to consider.

Three more nights, counting tonight

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Schoolteacher and former state superintendent candidate Kelly Payne shot the picture above last night, from the moment in scene 2 when I announce, “May I present our new neighbors at Netherfield: Mr. Charles Bingley (top), Miss Caroline Bingley, and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy…”

Though I’ve shot a lot of pictures of the production myself, is actually the first picture I’ve seen with me in it other than the dance one in which I am tiny and blurred. Seeing this, I’m thinking I might need to make the smile bigger. Sir William is an ebullient and convivial fellow.

If you’d like a better view of the whole thing, come on out. We’re performing in the amphitheater at Finlay Park at 7:30 tonight, Friday night and Saturday night, and then that’s it.

And it’s free.

I would have liked Ike, JFK, maybe even Nixon

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I was at first drawn in by this book review in The Wall Street Journal this morning, because at the outset it addressed a big concern I’ve had since the start of this election year:

Even as we tremble at the edge of a fiscal cliff, the culture war insists on our attention. Abortion, contraception, gay and women’s rights, and welfare have all returned to shake up an election season that was supposed to be a simple economy slugfest. Robert O. Self’s “All in the Family” could help explain why. Mr. Self, a professor of history at Brown University, has heroically researched the history of the culture wars from the early 1960s to the present. He offers a provocative analysis that accounts for today’s alliance between small-government and social conservatives, on the one hand, and welfare-state and social liberals, on the other….

However, I was less enchanted by what followed:

Mr. Self begins his history by describing “breadwinner liberalism” as the status quo of the early and mid-1960s. The architects of the Great Society assumed the primacy of male-earner and female-homemaker families. Labor unions fought for a family wage for their predominantly male membership, the Moynihan Report (1965) raised alarms about black male unemployment, and the first efforts at affirmative action took the form of quotas in municipal contracts for male construction workers. In all these cases “women were largely an afterthought,” Mr. Self writes. Breadwinner liberalism, he argues, was based on a model of “masculine individualism”: hardworking, striving, self-reliant….

The review goes on to recount the book’s take on the Kulturkampf that has plagued our politics since the 1960s. Apparently, the author of the book thinks the changes that have come are all to the good; the reviewer demurs.

All I know is this: In 1960, I could have been comfortable as a liberal. For that matter, in 1960, I could have been comfortable as a conservative. I can see myself having voted for Ike. I think I would have been torn between Nixon and Kennedy. (At the time, I favored Nixon, but I was only 7 years old. I don’t know what I would have done as an adult.)

Whatever happened, and however you define it, I can’t be at home in either camp today. And the Kulturkampf stuff is a big part of the reason why.

Pride and Prejudice and Skeeters

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Monday was our first night with lights. In this scene (still sans costume), the Bennets get to know Mr. Collins better than they'd like to.

Just to remind y’all that one reason I’m not blogging as much as usual these days is because of rehearsals for “Pride and Prejudice,” seven days a week.

Over the weekend, we further prepared our state of mind with Karen Eterovich’s (mostly) one-woman Jane Austen show at Drayton Hall. Just days before those performances, I was asked to play a small supporting role in that. Master Thespian that I am, I quickly mastered my three lines, which were as follows:

  1. “No.”
  2. “Yes.”
  3. “YES!”

Moving on from that triumph… Sunday night, we moved to Saluda Shoals park, where we open Friday night, which I believe is starting to freak everybody out just a bit.

Sunday night, we experienced rain. We moved inside to a very small room, and did a hurried run-through, which directors Linda Khoury and Paula Peterson said were our best performance yet. It was certainly… intimate. In a dance scene, one of the actresses and I ran into each other via our posteriors. It occurred to me that this was unexplored cultural ground: I had just done “the Bump” with Miss Jane Bennet. Lydia I could see, but Jane?

Then last night, there was a challenge of outdoor theater I had never anticipated, as we stood at the edge of woods damp from the rain, waiting to go on: Mosquitoes. As I waved and slapped at them, I took solace from Marty Feldman’s immortal words: “Could be worse. Could be raining…”

Three more nights…

At the edge of the woods, waiting to go on: Mr. Darcy (Gene Aimone) and my daughter, who plays Lady Lucas.

I, Sir William Lucas, hereby invite every one of you to the ball we’ll be hosting next month

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Have you seen any of the series AMC has been rerunning lately, “Into the West”? I watched some of the first episode. It had a lot of mountain men in it. I thought, “What a fine bunch of distinguished-looking gentlemen…”

Lately whenever we have a meeting with an ADCO client, one of my colleagues will at some point in the meeting say something like, “In case you’re wondering why Brad is looking like this…”

To put it one more way: Lately I have not been mistaken for Don Draper.

Here’s the story:  I have a role in the South Carolina Shakespeare Company’s production of “Pride and Prejudice,” which opens at Saluda Shoals Park. And yes, we all know that the Bard did not write that one. But I suppose the company’s repertoire is broader than its name suggests.

Our director, Linda Khoury, has asked us not to get our hair cut from here on — mine was already pretty shaggy by the time she said that. I had also stopped shaving at that point. But English gentlemen did not wear beards during the Regency Period, you will no doubt say. You are right. But I thought it would look a little less crazy and anachronistic if I grew the whole thing out, and then cut it back to muttonchops at the last minute.

I have a fairly small part in the production, which suits my comfort level at this point in my acting career. It’s been more than a quarter century since I have trod the boards for anything more than a cameo, so it’s nice to know I don’t have more than about five lines.

I’m playing Sir William Lucas (who was played by this guy in the definitive 1995 BBC series). If you know the story, you know Sir William and Lady Lucas are sort of the local aristocracy in the environs of Meryton in Hertfordshire (and their daughter, Charlotte, is Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s particular friend). My character was in trade before his elevation to the knighthood, which I’ll thank you not to mention. Sir William’s function in the play is to throw the ball that gets the principal characters together, introduce them, and try with mixed success to get them to dance and have a good time. Sir William is sort of an early 19th-century party animal, and regularly gives two balls a season.

In being the hearty, jovial, back-slapping good-time Charlie, I’m playing against type, which I hope everyone will take into account in assessing my performance. (The character in the play whose personality is most like mine is Mr. Darcy, and I’m just a year or two too old for that.)

I got involved in this because my daughter and granddaughter are in it. They are portraying Lady Lucas and Miss Kitty Bennet, respectively. We’re all having fun so far.

Here’s the info on the performances:

Columbia SC—The role of The Bard will be temporarily played by the world’s most famous femaleBritish literary icon, as The South Carolina Shakespeare Company (SCSC) presents a celebration of all things Jane Austen to kick off its 2012-2013 season.  With a fast-paced and engaging adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and the debut of Cheer from Chawton, an internationally-acclaimed one woman Jane Austen tribute show, the Austen performances usher in SCSC’s 20th anniversary season featuring an extended calendar of events that include a winter production of Paul Rudnick’s contemporary comedy I Hate Hamlet and Carlo Goldoni’s classic comedy A Servant of Two Masters.

Entertaining thousands of South Carolina audiences with no-cost cultural enrichment since 1992, SCSC has selected Jon Jory’s staged adaptation of Jane Austen’s most famous work, Pride and Prejudice, as its season opener. A tale of love and values in class-conscious England of the late 18th century, Pride and Prejudice is a witty romance featuring the five Bennet sisters – including strong-willed Elizabeth and young Lydia – young women who have been raised by their mother with one purpose in life: finding a husband.

“With the debut of our 20th season, we are presenting a novel experience for our loyal audience but one that is also in keeping with our classical programming,” said Linda Khoury, founding director of the SCSC. “Jane Austen is an author who shares Shakespeare’s cultural relevance and she is universally praised for her keen observations and strong critiques of classicism and economic conditions of the 1700s. The wit, wry commentary and romantic travails of her characters are contagious for both Austen-ites and new fans alike.”

With such immensely popular material that has enjoyed high-profile film and miniseries treatments, Khoury has assembled a top-notch cast that is challenged with surpassing any existing impressions people may have of this famous story.  Pride and Prejudice will feature Scott Blanks, Gene Aimone, Katie Mixon, Jessica Mitchell, Tracy Steele, Marcus Thomas, Sara Blanks, and Malie Heider.

Pride and Prejudice will be performed October 5—7 at Saluda Shoals Park at 7:30 pm and October 17—20 and October 24—27 at the Finlay Park Amphitheatre beginning nightly at 7:30 pm.

As audiences prepare to encounter Austen’s memorably rich characters, they will also have the chance meet the author herself, as Cheer from Chawton will be presented the weekend prior to the Pride and Prejudice opening. In a creative collaboration with the University of South Carolina’s School of Theatre and Dance, Cheer from Chawton is an internationally acclaimed one woman “Jane Austen experience” conceived, written and performed by professional actor and USC MFA graduate Karen Eterovich. Performed throughout the United States and UK, Cheer from Chawtonoffers an intimate glimpse into Austen’s life, including her pointed observations on family, friends, suitors, and society, as well as her own hilarious early efforts as an author. The play will be performed Friday and Saturday, September 28 & 29, 2012, 8 pm at Drayton Hall on the USC campus.

The new stylebooks are here! The new stylebooks are here!

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I exchanged Tweets this morning with Paul Colford, director of media relations at The Associated Press. He was busily promoting the AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide, with tidbits such as this:

Election Day is uppercase; election night is not. See @AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide: http://bit.ly/Mrvs5u

I replied that I thought that had always been the rule, which caused Mr. Colford (see how I violated AP style there by calling him “Mr.”? I’m such a rebel) to respond that there was lots of other good stuff there.

I started looking into the subject, and saw that a whole new AP stylebook came out a couple of months ago, and I didn’t even know it. I’m not sure I even would have known it had I still been working at a newspaper. Aside from the fact that as editorial page editor I had long been deviating from AP style intentionally for years, I sensed that it wasn’t as big a deal as it had once been even among the mullahs of style orthodoxy.

(For those who have not spent their adult lives as journalists, perhaps I should explain: The AP stylebook is the guide to proper spelling and usage most widely accepted in print journalism. Newspapers that didn’t have their own full stylebooks — the vast majority — used it as their official bible, only issuing addenda for exceptions, local place names and the like.)

In my long-ago days as a copy editor (which was so long ago that I forget whether it is properly spelled that way or “copyeditor,” a lapse on my part that may be some sort of PTSD symptom), things were different. My colleagues and I who spent our days around the horseshoe-shaped desk at The Jackson Sun were really excited about the 1977 edition. We actually had a party at the managing editor’s house to distribute them. And there was much in this new release to satisfy the socially-challenged pedant. That was when the stylebook went, for the first time, from being a slim paper pamphlet that resembled the tracts that fundamentalists passed out with titles like “The Antichrist in Rome” to the thick, rich, spiral-bound volume that made it seem more like the Ultimate Answer to All Questions.

But that was then. In my last years at the paper, think I had one somewhere around my desk, but I almost never consulted it, and it was probably badly out of date. On the rare occasions when I looked something up to see what the style was so I could decide whether I wanted to follow it or not, I did so electronically. And yet I see one can still order the spiral-bound version.

Which is kind of nice. But it feels like almost as much an artifact of the past as those phone books that once so excited Navin Johnson.

The Raskolnikov Syndrome

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This wonderful photo, entitled "Portrait of Raskolnikov," was taken by Samanyu Sharma of India. I hope he doesn't mind my using it here; it just illustrated my point so well. I couldn't figure out how to contact him.

“You’re crazy,” Clevinger shouted vehemently, his eyes filling with tears. You’ve got a Jehovah complex… You’re no better than Raskolnikov –“
“Who?”
“–yes, Raskolnikov, who–“
“Raskolnikov!”
“– who — I mean it — who felt he could justify killing an old woman –“
“No better than?”
“– yes, justify, that’s right — with an ax! And I can prove it to you!”

I’ve long had this theory that people who do truly horrendous things that Ordinary Decent People can’t fathom do them because they’ve actually entered another state of being that society, because it is society, can’t relate to.

Quite simply, people like James Eagan Holmes are able to spend time planning a mass murder, prepare for it, gather guns and ammunition and explosives and body armor, and actually go to the intended scene of the crime and carry it out, without ever stopping and saying, “Hey, wait a minute — what am I doing?” because they’re not interacting enough with other human beings.

This allows their thoughts, unchecked, to wander off to strange places indeed — and stay there, without other people making social demands on them that call them back.

I think there’s a quality in the social space between people that assesses the ideas we have in our heads and tells us whether they are ideas worth having, or so far beyond the pale that we should stop thinking them. This vetting doesn’t have to be conscious; it’s not like you’re overtly throwing the idea out there and seeking feedback. I think that in your own mind, you constantly test ideas against what you believe the people around you would think of them, and it naturally affects how you regard the ideas yourself. I think this happens no matter how independent-minded you think you are, no matter how introverted in the Jungian sense. Unless, of course, you are a true sociopath. And I believe a lack of sufficient meaningful interaction with other people you care about plays a big factor in turning you into one of those.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov was the perfect case, fitting all the criteria we keep hearing about. Brilliant young mind, but he suffered a series of setbacks that embarrassed him and caused him to draw away from his friends. Living hundreds if not thousands of miles from his family, he was forced by lack of money to drop out of school. Rather than make money doing the translations his friend Razumikhin tried to throw his way, he fell to brooding in his ratty garret, or wandering alone through the crowded city, thinking — and not sharing his thoughts.

His murderous plan started with a provocative, if not quite mad, idea that he wrote an essay about — setting out the theory that extraordinary people who were destined to do extraordinary things for the world had a right, if not a duty, to step over the normal social rules and boundaries that restricted ordinary people. Had he been in contact with friends and family, they would have challenged him on this, as Razumikhin did late in the book, when he learned of the essay. Maybe they wouldn’t have changed his mind, in the abstract, but if he had been having dinner each night with his mother and sister, and going out for drinks regularly with Razumikhin, it would have been impossible for him to have carried it to the next level.

I’m not saying he would ever have run the idea up the flagpole with his friends and family, and then been checked outright. He wouldn’t have said, “I think my idea’s a good one, so you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to kill that old woman I keep pawning my possessions with, and take her money, and go back to school and achieve my potential.” No. What I’m suggesting is that if you are constantly around normal, decent human beings who care about you, who ground you in humanity, you won’t allow your thoughts to run that far out of bounds. You’ll check yourself.

My “proof” for this theory — which I’m sure has occurred to thousands of other people (I don’t share Raskolnikov’s delusions about my own brilliance) — lies in what happened when, unexpectedly, his mother and sister appear in his life again, right before him in his own dingy room.

It happens after Raskolnikov has committed his crime — a crime that that has an emotional impact on him he didn’t anticipate, although he’s more or less holding up. He has renewed acquaintance with Razumikhin, a bit late for any positive socializing influence to prevent the murders.

And he comes home, and BANG, there are the two most important people to him in the world, the people whose absence had sent him into such a tailspin:

The 40 years since I read that played a trick on me. I could have sworn that the passage was more specific about exactly what happened in his mind when he saw his mother and sister. I thought it said something like, “In that moment, it came to him in a flash what he had done.”

And maybe the translation I read did. Or maybe I was just so sure that that was the “sudden and insupportable thought” that “chilled him to the marrow.”

In any case, it still seems clear that while he had been able to think of his crime in one way in isolation — a way that actually made it possible — he didn’t truly realize what he had done, in human terms, until suddenly faced with the two people who most mattered to him, and who would be most horrified, to the cores of their souls, to know what he had done. He saw himself, and all he was and all his actions, in an entirely different way through their eyes.

Under my theory, if he had been in regular contact with his mother and sister, he would have had that realization long before getting to the point of committing his crime.

Tom Davis on Lindsey Graham on mandates

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File photo of Tom, taken at the governor's mansion back when he worked for Mark Sanford.

Most of the time, people say that Tom Davis is gearing up to run against Lindsey Graham in the 2014 Republican primary. Sometimes, they shift and say he’s one of those preparing to run against Nikki Haley that year. But usually, it’s Lindsey Graham.

Tom encourages that way of looking at things by posting stuff like this on Facebook:

Lindsey Graham is now in front of every TV camera he can find, condemning health insurance mandates, but making no mention of the bill he cosponsored in 2009 (S. 391; the Wyden-Bennett Act) to impose mandates and corresponding noncompliance penalties.

I had forgotten about the Wyden-Bennett Act, if I ever knew about it. Well, good for Lindsey.

Tom forgets that conservatives used to be for mandates, before Barack Obama started agreeing with them. But Tom is not alone in that. Republicans in general have wiped that from their memories, because it would be inconvenient to their goal of demonizing the president over it.

Remember how in 1984, Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia? Until things changed, and all those records and memories were expunged, because now Oceania had always been allied with Eastasia, and at war with Eurasia?

It works like that.

An unpardonable insult to Jack Kerouac

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I’m reeling here. I’m stunned. I’m looking about for some hope for the world.

In connection with a comment I was responding to today, I went looking for when I’d written about repealing the 17th Amendment not being such a crazy idea, and there I found a link to a Christopher Hitchens piece from early 2011, which I followed for nostalgic reasons, and noted there a link to the cover of the current edition of Vanity Fair, and there I saw the thing that shocked me.

What I saw (accompanied by a photo in which she demonstrated that, however much money you spend on a glamour shoot, there are some people you can’t MAKE glamorous, because their facial expression will drag the whole thing down) was a mention of Kristen Stewart — she’s the notably underwhelming star of the “Twilight” movies — in  the same breath as Jack Kerouac. I saw her name in connection with a coming movie adaptation of On the Road. In a connection that was crafted as though she were starring in it or something:

As the Twilight-series finale approaches, Kristen Stewart is also starring in this month’s Snow White & the Huntsman,followed by an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Ingrid Sischy finds her on the run, in Paris. Photographs by Mario Testino.

See? They even used the actual word, starring! Well, first, I had to think, so is she Dean Moriarty or Sal Paradise? Or Carlo Marx? And if so, how does that work? OK, so she’s Marylou. Well, I have to admit I don’t have as clear an image in my mind of Marylou as I do the others, except for this: I can’t imagine the wild jailkid Dean, the quintessential Mad One who burns, burns, burns across the American landscape, going for anyone remotely like Kristen Stewart. There is no way you envision her as a character produced by a brain writing on a continuous roll of butcher paper under the influence of benzedrine. (OK, so she’s based on a real-life person, but you know what I mean.)

Now, I’ve seen other people say less than kind things about this actress, and I was like, Aw, leave the kid alone, but when you start talking about putting her anywhere near the centerpiece of anything as iconic as On the Road, well you’ve gone to messin’. Near as I can tell, there’s a reason why she was the star of the Twilight movies. It’s because she was so painfully ordinary and unremarkable that teenage girls everywhere could project themselves onto her, and identify.

That’s not a quality I connect with Kerouac.

Also… one expects a Kerouac project to have a bit of an alternative feel to it, and not be cast according to mundane box office considerations.

OK, that’s about all I’m going to say, except to say that this is a little bit personal for me. Kerouac introduced me to my wife. OK, not personally, because he was dead at the time. What I mean to say is, we met at this party she threw for a mutual friend, and she was reading a Kerouac biography at the time, and I was reading On the Road for the first time, and we realized it and started talking about that, and connected in a powerful way, and started dating seriously about a week later, and were married a year after that.

So, you know… it seems like whoever was in charge of casting would have checked with me or something…

Rielle Hunter: The assignment I declined to take

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Sunday, I was having Father’s Day dinner with my two sons (all my daughters being out of town), my daughter-in-law and two of my grandchildren at Yesterday’s, and my phone rang.

It was The New York Post. If you’ll recall, I represented that paper at the infamous Mark Sanford confessional press conference in June 2009, and they have called me since then from time to time when pursuing a story in SC. I’m generally glad to help when I can. Working with those folks can be an interesting change of pace.

This time, when the editor heard I was having Father’s Day dinner, he said he’d let me go, which I appreciated. But my curiosity was piqued.

A couple of hours later, he called me again, and asked if I could do a job for them. I asked what job.

Basically, they had heard that someone in this part of the country had advance copies of Rielle Hunter’s book. They wanted me to obtain a copy, read it quickly, and file a story that night.

I declined, and offered them someone else who might be interested in doing the story for them.

Part of it was that I was behind on some stuff I had meant to get done during my week off, and needed to get done before heading back to the office on Monday.

But part of it, I confess, was… well, you know the adage, You couldn’t pay me enough to do that? I’d rather have my gums scraped with a rusty screwdriver than read a single page of a tell-all book by Rielle Hunter. Every second I would spend doing that, I’d be acutely aware of all the good books out there that I probably won’t have time to read in my lifetime, and the sense of wasted time would be like a physical pain. I don’t even want to spend time passively listening to someone sum up her book in 25 words or less, much less spend any of my finite time on this planet reading anything that she might have to say. Just the thought of the exertion required to pick up such a book made me recoil.

I see they got somebody to do the story. Good. Especially since it wasn’t me.

I hope this doesn’t mean they won’t call me when they have something I would jump at (like the Sanford thing — I was burning with curiosity to know where our gov had been). But if so, having dodged any contact with a book by Rielle Hunter would have been worth the loss.

Post-newspaper retail environment born in 1962

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This morning was one of those moments when several threads came together for me, providing a small insight into the shape of the world in which we live.

It’s related to a moment of revelation I experienced in about 1996. I was attending one of a series of monthly meetings that our then-new publisher, Fred Mott, had instituted to brief employees in general about the state of the business side of the newspaper. I was probably sitting there trying not to let my eyes glaze over too obviously when he said something that cut through. Something that should have been obvious, but was not until that moment.

He observed — I forget exactly how he said it, but this was what I got out of it — that Walmart had shifted the ground upon which the business model of newspapers had been built. The key element was “everyday low prices.” Everyone knew that Walmart was the place to get the lowest prices available locally on anything they sold. And they sold everything. If everyone knows that you have low prices every day — and not now and then, in the form of sales events — you have nothing to communicate, on a regular basis, through advertising.

To show how that affected but one of the newspaper industry’s key advertising constituencies… people were used to reading about all the grocery stores’ specials — which changed if not day to day, then at least week to week — in the newspaper. But what’s the point in that if you can get all those same groceries — same brands and everything — cheaper at Walmart? And every day. So beyond some general branding, which it does mainly through television, reminding people of said everyday low prices, what does Walmart have to communicate? There is no news to pass on. That gives it yet another competitive advantage over those regular advertisers, because it saves the ad costs. To try to compete, those advertisers cut back on their ad budgets, and so forth.

And since Walmart sells practically everything a mass market wants, there is no retailing area unaffected. Department stores, appliance stores, clothing stores — everybody is competing against an adversary that doesn’t have to advertise to the extent that they traditionally had done.

That was just a piece of what was strangling newspapers, but a significant piece. Hence the expense cutbacks and hiring freezes that were already a monotonous part of newspaper life. The next year, Fred made me his editorial page editor, and shortly thereafter, as a measure of his confidence in me and his perception of the importance of the editorial mission, I was able to grow my department by one FTE. That was it. From then on, every budget year was an exercise in doing it with less. And less. And less. Until, two publishers later, it was decided to do without me.

But where did Walmart come from?

I got to thinking about that this morning. I was reading, in the WSJ, an oped piece about Eugene Ferkauf, who recently died at the age of 91.

In the postwar years, he pioneered discounting through his chain of stores called E.J. Korvette. This required challenging the “fair trade” price-fixing laws then in place in many states:

Retail price-fixing in the United States—often packaged for popular consumption as “fair-trade” laws—was a Depression-era concoction. Launched in California in 1931, it was quickly copied by state legislatures across the country. These statutes were premised on the idea that manufacturers retain a legal interest in the price of their products even after actual ownership has moved downstream to retailers. The laws were written so that once a single retailer in a fair-trade state agreed to observe the manufacturer’s proposed retail price list, it would in effect impose those prices on all other retailers in the state.

Conceived as a means of protecting small, independent merchants against predatory chains, fair-trade laws were pushed through state houses by legislators beholden to the influential retail chambers of commerce. The big manufacturers, especially appliance makers like GE, Westinghouse, RCA and Motorola, usually lent tacit support. It was easier for them to deal with a multitude of small customers through their wholesalers than to directly confront retailers big enough to muscle them for price concessions and promotional allowances…

I had never heard of E.J. Korvette stores, but I got to thinking, when was the first time I experienced discount store shopping? I realized that it was when we moved to New Orleans in 1965, after having lived in South America since late 1962. One of the elements of modern American culture that made an impression on me that year was the local Woolco store, a short drive from my home.

Anybody remember Woolco? They went out of business for good in the 80s, but this one was thriving in 1965.

I looked it up on Wiki, and found that Woolco was founded in 1962. This made me curious, and I looked to see when Kmart was founded. 1962. When did the first Walmart open? As it happens, 1962.

Then there was this passage in the oped piece this morning about Ferkauf:

In the end, the demise of fair-trade laws didn’t help E.J. Korvette. Ventures into high-end audio, home furnishings, soft goods and even supermarkets made E.J. Korvette considerably bigger but also shakier financially. In July 1962, Ferkauf was on the cover of Time magazine, hailed as the PiedPiper of the new consumer-centered retailing. Four years later he was ejected from his company, which by 1980 went into final bankruptcy. Ferkauf’s legacy, though, was secure. He had finally killed off legally protected price fixing.

Something about that year. A cusp of sorts. A changing of the guard, as retailing pivoted.

In his awesome book The Catalog of Cool (and if you can lay hands on a copy, you should buy it — although you may want to go the used route, since Amazon prices new copies at $127 and more), Gene Sculatti published an essay titled “The Last Good Year.” An excerpt:

Sixty-two seems, in retrospect, a year when the singular naivete of the spanking new decade was at its guileless height, with only the vaguest, most indistinct hints of the agonies and ecstasies to come marring the fresh-scrubbed, if slightly sallow complexion of the times. On the first day of that year, the Federal Reserve raised the maximum interest on savings accounts to 4 percent while “The Twist” was sweeping the nation. A month later “Duke of Earl” was topping the charts, and John Glenn was orbiting the good, green globe. That spring Wilt Chamberlain set the NBA record by scoring 100 points in a single game and West Side Story won the Oscar for Best Picture. The Seattle World’s Fair opened, followed five weeks later by the deployment of five thousand U.S. troops in Thailand. Dick Van Dyke and The Defenders won Emmys, and Adolph Eichman got his neck stretched. By that summer, the Supreme Court had banned prayer in public school, Algeria went indy, and Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose…

No mention of a major shift in retailing, though, as I recall.

One last tidbit, which you may consider to be unrelated…

Recently, I picked up several old paperbacks for 50 cents each at Heroes and Dragons on Bush River Road. One of them was The Ipcress File, which is what originally turned me on to spy fiction. You may recall the 1965 film, with Michael Caine — who expressed the cooler, hipper side of the 60s, as opposed to the mass-production James Bond.

In it is a passage in which the protagonist has a conversation with an American Army general who points out that the essential difference between the United States and Europe was this: A European develops a ballpoint pen, and sells it for a couple of quid and makes a modest living from it. An American, he said, invents the same thing and sells it for 5 cents a pop and becomes a millionaire.

Where am I going with this? Well, The Ipcress File was first published in 1962.