TMZ of The Lost Generation

Title: The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

Rating: 4 Stars

This was one of those classic books that I’ve run across before but have always shied away from. Gertrude Stein is infamous for her experimental literature. I haven’t had the opportunity to read her before, but in my experience experimental in literature usually means confusing and frustrating in an intentionally obtuse manner. Reading a 300 page autobiography of her lifelong partner seemed like it would be challenging.

That shows how little I knew about it. Knowing that it’s an fascinating subject and that many people would be interested, she intentionally wrote it in an accessible manner. The book was by far the most successful thing that she wrote. In fact, except for a couple of dry spots, it was actually pretty delightful to read.

Let’s start with the fact that it’s not an autobiography of Alice B Toklas. It is allegedly written in her voice. One of the reviews that I read of it was that it actually does do a good job of imitating her stories and her voice. Having said that, it truly was written by Gertrude Stein. At the end of the book Stein mentions that she kept encouraging Toklas to write an autobiography but finally ran out of patience and ended up writing it herself.

This is not the only book that I’ve read where the rules of autobiography have been upended. I’ve written about it before, but Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the unauthorized autobiography of game show creator and host Chuck Barris plays similar games with the genre. In Barris’ case he knowingly lied about his autobiographical details by claiming to be a CIA hit man at the same time that he was running game shows like The Dating Game. Here, Stein seems to be playing pretty straight with her facts and stories, but hides behinds the Toklas persona.

Hiding behind Toklas’ voice works to Stein’s benefit. The book is effectively Stein’s autobiography but told through the voice of her longtime life partner. Doing so allows her to glorify her accomplishments without braggadocio. For instance, quite literally on the first page, Stein, in the voice of Toklas, writes that Stein, along with Pablo Picasso and the philosopher Alfred Whitehead, is one of the three great geniuses of her age. Making such a grandiloquent claim while hiding behind Toklas is pretty hilarious. Similarly, writing as Toklas, Stein boldly puts forth that she has essentially blazed a brand new form of literature that lesser lights like Sherwood Anderson are now following. Considering the relatively modest position her reputation is now in the literary world, such audacious claims make me smile.

Another interesting product of writing an autobiography from a third person perspective is that, if you’re a person that is not comfortable sharing intimate thoughts, this allows you to hide those uncomfortable thoughts. Writing as Toklas, she just describes her adventures and her accomplishments. Since Toklas would be expected to have no insights into her introspective thoughts, she can describe these without the difficulty of expressing messy interior thoughts.

The big reason why I found this book so entertaining is that for a period of some twenty years or so, Stein and Toklas were at the center of a cultural moment. For a period of time from about 1910 to 1930 or so, she had a simply unimaginable number of intimate friendships with people that were or became celebrated artists. Her best friend was probably Pablo Picasso. Check out the list of people that she name drops in this book: Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Isadora Duncan, Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, May Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. That’s just a partial list.

In case you think that she just hung around artists, she also met such people as John Reed, the communist activist / journalist that inspired the movie Reds and the great muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffins.

For many of these characters, she tells interesting anecdotes about them. They had spirited dinners together. Stein ran a salon where many of them congregated and argued. In fact, if the book is to believed, Toklas was the person that introduced Hemingway to the majesty and mystery of bullfighting. If true, in so doing she altered literature history.

It wasn’t just about dinners and conversation. One of the most significant events in classical music history is the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. For those unaware, the music was so unconventional that the audience rioted. Stein and Toklas were actually there at that premiere in 1913. Similarly, they were active during WWI. They drove a truck delivering supplies to wounded soldiers in hospitals. At the end of the way, they made their way to the front and witnessed the front line trenches.

Especially during the years before WWI, Stein and Toklas, along with their fellow artists, lived in relative poverty. I say relative because even though they did not have much money, they still managed to have a servant. If they suffer from poverty, it’s left unsaid how poor their servant must have been. Regardless, they were able to purchase paintings from their friends for pittances. Some painters outright gifted them their work. So, even though they lived at a not very luxurious address, their walls were covered with fine art that in later years would appreciate significantly.

Given that they lived in relative poverty but in an artistically rich environment, it should be no surprise that this book would resonate so strongly with the 1960s counterculture. In many ways, Stein and Toklas lived their lives in the 1910s in a manner that the later generation much envied.

This book was an entertaining look at an important cultural moment.

Won The Battle But Losing The War

This is the third post about Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland. You can surmise three things from that. One is that it is really long (over 1000 pages). More importantly, several things stuck in my mind as I read.

The one that I want to write about today is the rise of the religious right. Sure there was the whole Monkey Trial evolution saga in the 1920s, but the religious right had been pretty quiet. In the 1940s and the 1950s, they united with politicians and corporations in the face of the communist threat. Still, this didn’t go a whole lot further than purely symbolic things like throwing ‘under God’ into the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m not aware of huge voting initiatives or movements to elect politicians that held to a very strict set of religious beliefs. If anything, during the 1960s, what relatively minor political activity there was was in protest of the Vietnam War.

I mentioned him briefly in an earlier post, but Richard Viguerie played a key role. With a background in mass mailings, he understood the heretofore untapped potential of all of those millions of peoples sitting in church pews in congregations all across the US. Using his organization and marketing skills, he was able to create mailings lists numbering in the millions. He could then send message blasts full of red hot hate about the latest things that liberal politicians were doing to destroy the fabric of our great country. 

Much better known are Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly, the leader in the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, and Anita Bryant, there to protect all of us from the scourge of all of those gay people out trying to recruit our children into their satanic ways.

Here’s the thing, it worked.

The ERA was just a state or two from passing. It looked inevitable. Hell, it’d been in the Republican party platform since 1940 (it was only removed in 1980 with the Reagan revolution). By the time Schlafly was going around telling everyone how passing the ERA was going to result in same sex bathrooms, women serving in the army, and compulsory day care, the ERA seemed to be some insidious piece of Trotskyite propaganda designed to turn men into women and vice versa. The ERA stalled under the onslaught.

Miami was one of the most gay friendly cities in the country in the 1970s. A nondiscrimination ordinance against sexuality was passed by the council. It was broadly supported and considered noncontroversial. Former Miss America Anita Bryant, the face for Florida oranges, saw this as a dire threat. She thundered that if gays got their way, that there’d be gay teachers in school teaching from gay text books. Next, they might want to even marry. The thinking was that since gay people can’t reproduce, the only way that they can get more gay people is by recruiting them. The initiative to repeal the ordinance was successful. A movement was born that shut down gay rights advances across the country. There was even attempt to repeal a similar ordinance in that most gay friendly of all cities, San Francisco. That failed but it showed that they were out for blood everywhere.

The most important and emotional issue to the religious right was abortion. If you were (and even now, are) supportive of a woman’s right to choose, you were a child murdering sinner. It really was as simple as that. 

This was one of the issues that Jimmy Carter was hammered with. Even though he himself was a fervent, Sunday school teaching, evangelical Christian, the fact that he respected Roe v Wade was damning. This was true even when running against the divorced, non church attending Ronald Reagan. Similarly there were some great liberal legends that had spent their political life serving the needs of their community that went down in flames on this issue. During the Democratic bloodbath of 1980, Senate institutions such as George McGovern and Frank Church lost reelection.

The religious right swung hard at the fences. They proposed a Human Rights Amendment to overturn Roe v Wade. They proposed another to allow prayer in school. They fought to bring religious instruction back into public schools. They were out to change the fabric of our society back to some simpler non-existent time in our history where the Ten Commandments were all the law that our country needed.

Here’s the thing, despite all of their victories, they failed.

First of all, let’s talk about the easy one. One of the things that they wanted to abolish was pornography. How do you think that effort’s gone over the last forty years? Here, let me just start up a new tab in my browser and give me five seconds.

Gay marriage is now legal in all states. Gay teachers openly teach in public schools. In school curricula, you can read about nonstandard families that yes, sometimes have two moms or two dads. In most states, people can choose the bathroom that matches their own self assigned gender.

Women can serve in the military. Women can even serve in combat. Check out Senator Tammy Duckworth. Millions of women place their children in day care. Most women choose a career if given the option. It’s not compulsory. Women that want to be married and stay at home with their children certainly still have that option. You know, it’s a woman’s right to choose?

Those much ballyhooed constitutional amendments came nowhere near passing. I don’t know anyone that is still complaining about not allowing prayer in schools. All of the brouhaha about teaching Intelligent Design alongside evolution seems to have faded away.

Sure, there are states that, as we speak, are chipping away at abortion rights. They might even be successful. However, all that does is to force women of limited economic means to carry their pregnancy to term. Women of even modest means will be able to travel to another state. I see no real national initiative to ban abortion coming to pass anytime.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad that poor women might not have the choice that they deserve. If that is all the religious right accomplish, then that falls far short of their goals of the late 1970s.

So, while I was reading about all of their horrors and fears of the looming moral collapse that they were so valiantly fighting against, I have to say that they pretty much failed on all fronts. Considering the fairly dramatic drop in church attendance rates over the last 40 years, it’s hard for me to see how they’re going to reverse that.

Despite the fact that gays are out of the closet and are getting married, that for the most part women still have the right to choose, that the Ten Commandments are not being taught in schools but evolution is, our country seems to be still standing.

Bending The Arc Away From Justice

Title: Reaganland

Rating: 4 Stars

Having now completed this mammoth book, I see a couple of through lines. One is the rise of the religious right. Another is corporations using their financial power to start muscling candidates to rollback the previous decades of workplace reform. There is the downright ineptness of Jimmy Carter as a President. His economic policies were woefully misguided, but his messaging was even worse. He managed to turn people against him that actually agreed with his policies. Finally, although he made many wrong turns and missteps, Ronald Reagan was the perfect candidate to run against the hapless Carter.

The end result of this was an electoral landslide for Reagan. Although he only carried a bit under 51 percent of the popular vote (and only some 52 percent of eligible voters actually voted), he carried forty-four states in the electoral college. He beat Carter in the popular vote by nearly ten percent. The Republican John Anderson running as a third party candidate carried over six percent. Reagan won by winning the blue collar union vote and sweeping nearly all of the Southern states. The Southern state sweep is amazing because, for the previous century, Republicans had barely campaigned there (you know, the whole Civil War thing). The union vote is tragic because the 1980s ushered in the decimation of the union movement. The air traffic controllers union actually endorsed Reagan for President. He ended up firing all of them about six months into his term.

In partial defense of Carter, his Presidential term did pretty much suck. From 1977 to 1980, there was the nuclear accident at 3 Mile Island, the discovery of industrial pollution at Love Canal, the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, Jim Jones’ massacre in Guyana, an oil crisis, serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, Skylab falling, the Iranian revolution, a trucker strike that shut down the country, attacks on abortion clinics, the fall of the dollar, and stagflation (the seemingly impossible slow growth, high unemployment, and high interest rates).

Carter took bold action on many of these things. He brought in Paul Volcker as the fed chairman. Volcker promptly took action to bring down the inflation rate by dramatically reducing credit. Considering that at the time of this writing, the fed rate is .25, under Volcker it went as high as twenty percent. Imagine that. To get a loan, you’d have to pay something north of twenty percent a year. 

On top of that, Carter took the seriously misguided advice that another approach to solving the problem was austerity. He advocated deep cuts to the federal budget. When in a low growth economic crisis, this is precisely the wrong path to take. This austerity along with his well meaning advice to Americans to conserve energy (to an American audience thoroughly not used to such sacrifices) made him seem to be more of a Scrooge in Chief than anything else.

And then of course, there was the Iranian hostage crisis. Looking back, letting the Shah come to the US was easily the dumbest mistake that Carter made. He even knew it at the time. When they were considering the decision, Carter asked his staff what would be his options if the Iranians took hostages in reprisal. No one had answers. Even so, powerful men like Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller put immense pressure upon Carter to let him in. Jimmy Carter is always portrayed as an outsider, but the fact is he was a member of the insider Trilateral Commission that Rockefeller founded. He let the Shah in for medical treatment and just a few short weeks later the hostages were taken in a chaotic scene in Iran.

Although Carter never used the word malaise in a speech, that seemed to sum up the nation’s attitude. Into this environment Reagan was a bright ray of optimistic sunshine. Even though he had a long history of saying incredibly conservative, saber rattling things, for the most part the media didn’t really emphasize his past. Knowing his penchant for expressing extreme or even bizarre beliefs to innocuous questions, he was purposefully kept away from the press. In fact, in their quest to show how reasonable he was, there was a whole department in his campaign that was responsible for sending out notes to important personages in his name. Someone in that department would read a book that a prominent person wrote and would then write a thoughtful analysis of it. The message would be sent to Reagan (with a note not to bother reading the book) for his signature. Inevitably, the original author, flattered that Reagan would take the time and effort to send such an impressive note, would publish it. This led to a general attitude that, really, Reagan wasn’t such an unreasonable guy after all.

However, let’s not lose sight of who Ronald Reagan was. There’s no shortage of anecdotes where he said things that made for wonderful anecdotes but were completely factually false. No matter how many times he was corrected, he would just keep repeating the same anecdotes. That is bad for a politician but not fatal. What is fatal is the comment that Reagan said to Nixon when a number of African nations voted to have Beijing assume China’s UN seat instead of Taiwan. He said, “To see those monkeys from those African countries – damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Behind the genial, charming, twinkly-eyed demeanor, that is the real measure of the man.

Also keep in mind that the voter suppression attempts that the Republican party is currently attempting is not new to them. It’s not random that this election only had 52 percent participation. By making the election as ugly, vicious, and mean as possible, the Republicans actively tried to drive down voter participation. As Paul Weyrich said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people: they have never been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.”

From this debacle, the Democratic somehow Party internalized the lesson that the New Deal was dead. This was so even though a large majority of Americans actually still supported its policies. Specifically, Bill Clinton lost his re-election bid for Governor of Arkansas in 1980. He learned the lessons that he thought needed to be learned and ran for President in 1992 as a third way centrist.

An argument can be made that we are just now possibly emerging out of the shadow cast by the 1980 election.

An Origin Story Of Villainy

For the last couple of days, I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s book, Reaganland. This is the fourth in a series of histories written by a progressive historian about the modern conservative movement. Before the Storm was about the rise of Goldwater. Nixonland was about the 1968 election and Nixon’s first term. The Invisible Bridge was about the fall of Nixon and Ford’s presidency (with a heavy dollop of Reagan emerging onto the scene). Reaganland is about Carter’s presidency and the 1980 election of Reagan to his first term.

This is a wide and deep series. It attempts to chart how we moved from the 1964 landslide election of LBJ over Goldwater and the wide spread consensus that New Deal liberal politics stands without opposition, to the 1984 landslide election of Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale, cementing the conservative hold on American politics.

Each volume is about a thousand pages. Since I’m only a third of the way through Reaganland, this won’t be a review of the book. There is so much depth that I just wanted to write an interim blog because I’ve found it all so interesting.

The first thing to note is how dead the Republican party was after the Watergate debacle. In Carter’s election of 1976, the Republican party held both houses in only four states. They were only fourteen Republican governors. Only eighteen percent of Americans considered themselves to be Republicans. There was serious discussion regarding whether or not the party was in a irreparable death spiral.

So, how did they manage to start pulling themselves out?

First, much credit must go to Richard Viguerie, a person that today is largely forgotten. He essentially invented the idea of political mass mailing. His direct mail campaigns, featuring false but full of red meat allegations about how the liberal Democrats were destroying the American way of life, inspired millions of dollars in contributions. In turn, he applied his fund raising skills to the most aggressive conservative candidates running for office. His mailings were the rocket fuel that fed many fiery conservatives.

Republican women also played a huge role. The Equal Rights Amendment seemed to be sailing to an easy passage. After all, considering the sad history of women’s treatment in America, what could actually be wrong with enshrining in the Constitution that women have equality with men? Well, after Phyllis Schlafly was done, equal rights for women were equated with same sex bathrooms, abortion on demand, compulsory daycare (?!), women getting drafted into the military, and worse of all, rampant lesbianism. As with Viguerie, the message was that the sacred American way of life was imperiled by these perverted, Godless heathens.

To conservatives, after the failure in Vietnam, Watergate, the apparent rot of New York City, and the protests of the 1960s, they longed for a strong, virile America that bestrode the planet like a superpower colossus. To them, nothing seemed more symbolic of America’s weakness than Carter’s decision to turn over the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government. This wasn’t just Carter. This had been a treaty that had been in negotiation for over ten years. The conventional point of view was that this was one of America’s remaining symbols of imperialism. After all, the original canal deal had been made in a New York Hotel between some Americans and the failing French company that was trying to build it. There wasn’t a Panamanian in the room. In fact, the US government pretty much arbitrarily created the nation of Panama for the purpose of creating an entity that would allow the construction to take place. Although an amazing tribute to engineering skill and doggedness, it was a blot on our Central American historical policy. Turning it over to Panama would be a strong symbol to Central American nations.

Of course, the conservatives had a different point of view. They had a much simpler perspective: “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it.” Although the treaty was ultimately approved by the Senate, this was an inspiring issue for all conservatives to gather around. In the year 2021, it seems ridiculous that this arose such passions in the 1970s.

This was a time that saw the rise of evangelicals as a political force. Not only heavily involved in the effort to block the ERA, issues such as abortion and gay marriage inspired their efforts. Starting from issues like that, evangelicals also supported political subjects such as a balanced budget amendment that did not seem to carry as much moral weight.

Finally (and this is about where I’m at in the book), we see the rise of supply-side economics. With Judd Wanniski writing articles about the Laffer curve, the Republicans moved from their previous sober positions of fiscal restraint, not to mention Keynesian economic theories of managing inflation and unemployment. The Republican party became the economic equivalent of Big Rock Candy Mountain. Cutting taxes became this magic elixir that decreases unemployment, increases economic growth, increases tax revenues, and balances the budget!

One thing that came out of my reading is that, believe it or not, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats were once were a thing. There were Republicans that were very pro civil rights. There were Republicans that supported government regulation. After all, it was during the Nixon administration that the Department of Energy and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were created. Often bills were passed with huge bipartisan super majorities. On controversial issues where the votes would be much closer, the majority and minority leaders would work together to whip enough votes to squeak out a bare bipartisan majority. When I think of the COVID relief bill that just passed with not a single Republican vote, it makes me sad that our leaders now put party above country. It’s clear that over the ensuing 40 years since the events of this book, the parties have self selected themselves into homogeneous islands.

Just my opinion, but the conservative attacks that placed a premium of story over fact that started taking place during this time was a big driver for this metamorphosis. These lurid tales inspired a flood of money that poured into the coffers of those that got most red faced spouting off about how the liberals were destroying America. These are now our leaders and they know where their money is coming from.

Now here we are in the year 2021, where some insane percentage of Republicans think mass election fraud has taken place (with absolutely no real evidence to back this up), that Democrats are raping children in the basements of pizza restaurants, and quite literally tried to violently take over our federal legislature.

Given all that has happened over the last four years, it’s really hard for me to read Perlstein’s book without getting angry. Forty years later, I see the poisoned fruit of these seminal efforts.

Keeping Up With The Barrisons

I just finished reading a book called Dead Famous. Its theme is celebrity. What is it? How does it differ from fame? Or renown? Was Julius Caesar a celebrity?

Unfortunately, I can’t really recommend the book. In fact, I can’t even muster sufficient energy to even write about it. One part of the book that I did enjoy was the various characters over the last couple of hundred years that became celebrities during their time but are pretty much forgotten today.

I’d like to spend a little bit of time writing about some of these celebrities of yesteryear. These were people that were mobbed in the streets, had songs written about them, had souvenirs made in their image, made prodigious sums of money (in some cases), and were just generally idolized. How many of them have you heard of?

Edmund Kean: He was the Tom Cruise of the 19th century. After years of barely even marginal success, he managed to score a gig at the almost failing Drury Lane Theatre. His performance of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice electrified audiences. His performances immediately became and remained sold out sensations. He followed that up in short order with performances of Richard III, King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet. He had several successful tours of the US. He was the progenitor of today’s overnight successes that are actually the result of years of hard work.

Franz Liszt: He was the Elvis Presley of the 19th century. A musical prodigy, he became a virtuoso concert pianist known for his lightning speed. With his charismatic personality, flamboyant playing style, and long flowing locks, he developed a near cult like following. He had a huge fan base of adoring female followers so obsessed with him they longed to get even a lock of his hair. 

Evelyn Nesbit: She was the Kim Kardashian of the last century. A model, chorus girl, and actress, she was first discovered while she was in her early teens. For those of you up on your flapper culture, she was the prototype for the Gibson Girl. Seduced (actually raped) at about the age of 15 or 16 by the architect Stanford White when he was in his mid forties, she later married the wealthy scion Henry Thaw. Unfortunately, Thaw was abusive and mentally unstable. Consumed by thoughts of White, Thaw snapped and murdered him. The result was the first celebrity Trial of the Century. 

Mary Ann Evans: Do you remember all of the trouble Scarlet Johansson got in with her comments about playing Asian film roles? Well, Mary Ann Evans could probably relate. Born in Australia to a Scottish father, she somehow found herself in India. Starting in the 1930s, somehow the blond haired blue eyed Australian Scot became an action star in the burgeoning Bollywood film scene under the name of Fearless Nadia. She was the first breakout Bollywood movie star.

Joseph Pujol: So you think that novelty musical acts are a new inspiration? Sure we have Weird Al Jankovic and (for those a little older) Spike Jones. Well how about a flatulist (or, even better, a fartiste)? Yes, you can probably guess what his instrument was. He was able to fart at will and with control. Among other crowd pleasers, he could play La Marseillaise and blow out a candle from several yards away. BTW, if you’re going to be a fartiste, Pujol is a pretty awesome last name.

This is just a small subset. There are many, many other men and women that captured our cultural zeitgeist. For a time, we were obsessed with them and wanted to learn every little thing about them. It seemed like they were everywhere and we could never get enough of them. Their moment then passes, and if they are not careful, not only do they disappear into obscurity but sometimes into desperate poverty.

So, if you’re worried that the primary cultural artifact from our time will be Kim Kardashian, hopefully you will have found this little post reassuring. In all likelihood, a hundred years from now, she will have as much renown as Evelyn Nisbet does today.

Oh yes, one more thing. Who were the Barrisons from the blog title? Like the Kardashians, they were a family (in fact, five sisters). A song and dance act, they were big in the 1890s. One of their signature songs was called, and I kid you not, “Would You Like To See My Pussy?”. They would sing the song and slowly lift their dresses. Once the audience was in an appropriate froth, they would hike their dresses higher and the small kittens that were strapped to their upper thighs would be exposed. 

Stay classy celebrities!

Fighting The Zombie Apocalypse

Title: Arguing with Zombies

Rating: 5 Stars

Let’s get this out of the way first. For the most part, this is kind of a lazy book. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist that writes a column in the New York Times. The vast bulk of the essays in this collection have previously appeared in the New York Times in one form or another. So, if you’re a New York Times subscriber or have already consumed Krugman’s columns in some other form, this will be largely redundant to you.

The newspapers that I subscribe to only periodically run Krugman’s columns. I always find his point of view to be interesting, and most importantly when it comes to opinion pieces, to be actually based upon facts. Even though I knew that this would be a rehash of previously written columns, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to catch up on a writer that I enjoy reading.

As I said, Krugman is a Nobel Prizing winning economist. One of the major themes of this collection is how a theory based research economist ended up writing a primarily political column. I found that journey itself to be interesting.

Having said that, the most interesting theme is the struggle that he has had, over the past twenty years, debating both economic and political theories when the opposing point of view barely even maintains a fig leaf of truth or reality.

I consider myself a pretty fact based person. One of my frustrations over the last several years is how one side of the political spectrum (<cough>Republican<cough>) no longer even maintains a pretense of being evidence based. News that is unflattering to a conservative politician must be fake news. Elections that a Republican loses must be rigged or stolen. In my former home state of Washington, the Republican nominee for Governor, a woefully unqualified small town police chief (of a one man police force!) lost to the sitting two term governor (and past Presidential candidate) by well over ten percentage points and actually claimed that the election was stolen. It was ludicrous. I can’t even begin to get my brain wrapped around having it my job to resolutely and endlessly have to bat down willfully and woefully ignorant political positions.

That’s the Sisyphean task that Krugman has set up for himself in his columns. I have to say that he carries it off with aplomb. The term that he calls the economists and politicians that continue to regurgitate disproven or obsolete theories in the face of all evidence is zombies.  

Make no mistake what he’s facing. It’s a zombie apocalypse.  He is Ash facing off an Army of Darkness.

First of all, there’s the economists. After The Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes made a compelling argument that severe economic depressions or recessions are a demand problem. As Krugman repeatedly says, your spending is my income and my spending is your income. If the economy contracts, fewer dollars are spent, which means lower income, which means less money to spend, which means lower income, etc. The only way out of this trap is for the government to step in and to increase its discretionary spending. This adds more money to a system that desperately needs it.

Once stated, this idea appears almost childishly simplistic. Unfortunately, there’s a whole bunch of people (many of whom have a boat load of money to spend) that hates the idea of government spending because that could run the risk of them having to pay more taxes (gasp!). These people hire economists to argue that, no, actually a government is just like a house budget. After all, if someone in the house loses their job, everyone in the house cuts back, right? Well, since a house doesn’t print its own currency, that is not exactly comparing apples to apples. In fact, austerity during an economic downturn is pretty much the absolute worse thing that a government can do. This isn’t just theory. There have been multiple recessions both in the US and globally that have consistently proven this very point.

Even after multiple real world failures, there are still economists espousing the theory that reducing taxes on the very wealthy will inevitably yield higher tax results and greater economic growth. Having been tried during three Republican administrations, this led to unspectacular growth rates and mushrooming budgets. Even their one semi-successful example from early in the Reagan administration (nearly forty years ago) was the result of other factors. On the other hand, when the Democratic administrations of Clinton and Obama came in and slightly raised tax rates on the wealthy, the economy grew and budget deficits plummeted.

These are only two examples of zombies that he fights. In this collection there are eighteen sections of essays. In other sections he takes on the zombie economists / politicians that either argue against or actually deny such topics as wealth inequality and climate change.

Here’s the thing. There’s nothing wrong with conservative philosophy. It can be argued with honor. If you do argue with honor, you have to admit that a philosophy isn’t infallible religious dogma. If the evidence doesn’t match your philosophy, you have to be able to either accommodate the new facts or you have to modify your philosophy. As Daniel Moynihan famously said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts”. Today, many prominent people in movement conservatism seem to think that facts are simply irrelevant.

As is often said, there’s nothing harder to do than to convince someone to change their mind than when their paycheck relies upon them not to.

Keep up the fight Paul!

 

Mansplaining To Joan Of Arc

Title: The Passion of Joan of Arc

Rating: 4 Stars

The story of Joan of Arc is one of those historical events that doesn’t seem to be possible. Starting in the 14th century, France and England fought the Hundred Years’ War. The Hundred Years’ War is not only not an exaggeration, but actually undersells it a bit. The war went on for 116 years.

At the point of this story, the war had been going on for about a hundred years. France was in trouble. Various English King Henrys had proclaimed themselves king of both England and France. The various French Charles were either insane or ineffectual.

Onto the scene comes Joan. Having first started receiving visions of angels when she was about thirteen, when she was sixteen, she was inspired to go to the French crown prince (known as the Dauphin) to send her to the siege at Orleans. It really says something about the desperate straits that France found herself in that the Dauphin to agree to send the illiterate sixteen year old young woman.

Even more amazingly, it worked. She inspired the French soldiers and they broke the siege of Orleans. Without question she went into battle wearing armor. There’s some question regarding how much military leadership she provided, but it does appear that at Orleans and later battles, she provided military strategy to the French army. This led to a change in fortune of the Hundred Years’ as the French began to gain the advantage.

Understandably, the English were pretty much convinced that she was a witch. Eventually captured, she was put on trial, convicted, and burned at the stake in the French town of Rouen when she was about nineteen. On a personal note, many years ago, I was in France and visited Rouen. The site where she was apparently burned is now a tourist destination.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is a silent film made in 1928. At one time, it was only available in corrupt versions after government and church censorship. It was considered to be one of the great lost classics. Bizarrely enough, a full version was discovered in a Norwegian mental hospital in 1981.

In the film, Joan has been captured. She is put on trial by religious authorities. They try to get her to confess. She refuses and is threatened with torture. Faced with death, she signs a false confession. Realizing that doing so is a betrayal of God, she recants. She is then burned at the stake. The soldiers beat the people that have been converted by Joan’s martyrdom. A closing caption says that the smoke is guiding her soul into heaven.

Looking at it from the lens of 2021, this film is all about the tyranny of the patriarchy. It is Joan, a very young woman, against a horde of much older men. Intentionally filmed with out makeup or flattering lighting, the men (and there are dozens of them) look like gargoyles. Their faces, full of warts and wrinkles, have expressions that vary from grim judgmentalism to outraged fury at the audacity of this woman to withstand their withering questioning.

The men do not fight fairly. They hurl questions at her from all different directions. They ask loaded questions so that they can pounce on her if she makes a religiously unorthodox answer. They shout her down when she tries to answer. They fake a letter from the French king to encourage her to renounce. A priest pretends to be her honest confidant but is actually working for the authorities. They demonstrate their torture devices to terrify her into submission.

I imagine that there are women today that can empathize with Joan’s plight. Especially in the software or engineering world, it’s not unusual for there to be only one woman in a meeting. In such a world composed of alpha geek engineers, it’s often difficult for the woman’s voice to be heard. In fact, I knew of a female software engineer in an organization comprised of over one hundred engineers. In that organization, there were more engineers named Dan or Dave than there were women. Women in this organization were routinely assigned insignificant roles and were denied opportunities for advancement.

Watching these elderly, grotesque men angrily berate this earnest young woman on whether or not she had a personal relationship with God seemed to be the epitome of mansplaining.

Similar in nature to the patriarchy, this was also about the immense might of the state against an individual. Always outnumbered, usually by dozens of authority figures, Joan does not have a chance against the state apparatus. The state will take whatever means necessary to get the results that it wants. Intimidating, lying, and fraud are all options on the table. Capital punishment, then as now, is the ultimate statement of state authority over an individual’s rights.

Maria Falconetti’s performance is considered one of the great of the silent film era. It must have been grueling. She is crying in nearly scene. In most of the film, her expressive face is in tight closeup.

The use of closeups is one of the visual highlights of this film. Not just Joan but all of the characters are shown in very tight closeups. You can see the spittle fly as they yell their abuse at Joan. To recreate 15th century France, an extensive setting was built. Since the director insisted on using such tight closeups, much to the producers’ displeasure, most of the set never appeared in the final print.

One final note concerns the fact that I think that I’ve established that Robert Duvall is a vampire. One of the priests in the film (again, to remind you, made in 1928) bares an astonishing resemblance to Duvall. Just so you know.

The film itself suffers from the fate of many silent films in that, even at a relatively speedy 80 minutes, it drags a bit. Especially with so many scenes in tight closeup, how many minutes do you really want to spend watching Joan cry? Except for the final burning at the stake, there’s really not a lot of activity taking place.