Hoyne River

Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers is a terrific book. Well, half a terrific book. The “and it’s Thinkers” half is a dull, but the “American Foreign Policy” half is a spirited argument about America’s post-WWII history. 

Anderson argues that America, since the war, has ruthlessly and effectively pursued a consistent foreign policy regardless of the President. That is establishing American Hegemony, or, as Anderson puts it, making the world safe for capital. The policy essentially takes the “Open Door” policy we imposed on turn-of-the-century China and attempts to impose it on the entire world. So far, it’s worked pretty well, but making this particular omelet has required the breaking of a lot of eggs.  

Anderson is a Brit and a Marxist one at that - I believe this essay was first published in his journal, The New Left Review - and consequently has a cold-eyed, astringent view of American history. His is not a perspective you hear much from in the mainstream press, which leads to the surprising revisionist arguments that makes this book so fun to read. Especially in the footnotes. The footnotes in this book are great. 

For example, Anderson argues that Stalin made two huge mistakes at the end of the war. First, he didn’t take Berlin when he had the chance:

In the last months of the war, Stalin had been so concerned with maintaining good relations with the allies that he bungled the capture of Berlin when Zhukov’s Army Group was a mere forty miles from the city across open country, with orders from its commander on February 5 to storm it on February 15–16. Stalin cancelled these instructions the following day, for fear of ruffling Allied feathers at Yalta, where the Big Three had just started to convene, and he received no favours in return. Had he let his generals advance as he had earlier agreed, the whole Soviet bargaining position in postwar Germany would been transformed.

Along the same lines, Stalin failed to take all of Korea. Worse than that, he actually invited the U.S. to take their half 

Division of the country was one of Stalin’s two great timorous blunders in the last months of the war, its consequences more disastrous than his failure at Berlin. Without any necessity, as Khrushchev later complained, he acceded to an American request that US troops occupy the southern half of the country, when none were anywhere near it, and the Red Army could without breaking any agreement have strolled to Pusan. Naturally, Truman did not reciprocate the favour and allowed not so much as a Soviet military band into Japan.

I saw this article knocking around on Facebook. It’s dumb, but dumb in a helpful way that illustrates a major problem with a certain brand of liberal thinking today. Namely, the obsession with personal virtue and the consequent abandonment of practical politics. 

The author is against gentrification - it’s “horrific,” she writes - and so has put together a list of things right-minded people can do to fight it. Here’s the list:

1) Acknowledge Your Privilege; 2) Respect the History of Your New Neighborhood; 3) Listen to the Voices of Your Neighbors; 4) Understand their Feelings; 5) Make Socially Conscious Purchase Decisions; 6) Invest in Community Organizations; 7) Question Exclusionary Tactics Claiming to Be About Safety; 8) Advocate for Yourself and Others; and 9) Vote

Only the last two items are practical, outwardly-directed actions - maybe # 6 too. The others are almost completely personal. They are ways for an individual to signal her virtue and righteousness. Ways she can differentiate herself from the bad gentrifiers - the “techbros,” etc. The advice boils down to “don’t be obnoxious” 

That’s fine, I guess, but its laughably solipsistic in the face of a problem with “horrific” consequences. To the extent you think gentrification is a problem - I am not sure that I do - individual virtue isn’t going to do a damn thing. Even if every high-income thirty-something yuppie moving to Humboldt Park were as sensitive and respectful as the most enlightened hashtag activists on twitter, they would still drive up home values and lead to the displacement of the poorer people who lived there before. The result would be the same. 

There are like 100 articles on Donald Trump right now, but this one from the Weekly Standard is worthwhile mostly because it points out that Trump always, always describes Jeb! as “low energy.” The insult is both true and truly hilarious. Well done, Donald. 

Also, I think this, from the Lefsetz letter, is right and a big part of his appeal: 

“Trump assumes you’re smart in a world where everybody is assumed to be dumb. That you can parse the issues and get sarcasm and realize that the front is not the reality.” 

In other words, he lets people feel like they are in on the joke. 

This is a smart piece on Review - the best thing going on TV right now. The show is totally hilarious and, thankfully, starting to get some buzz. See this New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/rate-culture

This is a book everyone in the 70′s probably read, but holy cow is Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days - about the months leading up to Nixon’s resignation - a trip. 

This scene, for example, has every Nixonian thing you could want - drama, surrealism, self-pity and Nixon’s weird locution. This is a few nights before the resignation when everyone was afraid Nixon would kill himself. 

“You fellows, in your business,” the President began, meaning the Army, which he always seemed to consider Haig’s business, “you have a way of dealing with problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer.” Haig waited.

“I don’t have a pistol,” the President said sadly, as if it were on more deprivation in a long history of underprivilege.

Thomas Dyja’s The Third Coast is a fun Chicago book. It’s a breezy cultural history of Chicago in the Forties and Fifties. It tells the story through sketches of the big artists and intellectuals who lived in Chicago in that period - folks like Mies Van Der Rohe, Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Nelson Algren, and Hugh Hefner. This was the period of Chicago’s peak population and, this book argues, peak cultural influence on the country.  

It’s an easy read and Dyja’s got a good eye for funny details Like this one about the Chicago Tribune’s crusade against Modern Art: 

The Tribune’s art critic, Colonel McCormick’s great-niece Eleanor Jewett, a former agriculture major who’d quit school to avoid having to witness the wickedness of breeding animals, lent her support to a vigilante group run by Art Institute trustee Mrs. Frank Logan called “Sanity in Art”; its righteous blue-haired members harassed visitors to Kuh’s gallery. - the city’s only gallery of modern art

And who knew those 50′s drive-ins were so seedy:

McDonalds had no female employees, and especially no carhops giving hand jobs in the parking lot, a practice more common than anyone liked to admit. All the countermen wore white pants, white-short-sleeved shirts, and white paper hats as spotless as the stainless-steel surfaces on the kitchen, every inch visible through the glass windows at the front, where customers came to be served. McDonalds had nothing to hide. 

This is a subtle burn of Adlai Stevenson:

I was actually working on this post and the goddamn Washington Post beat me to it. But they don't go far enough. @dick_nixon is - by far - the best political commentator out there working today and the best thing on Twitter since Dan Sinker's Mayor Emmanuel. 

We play the long game. Certain people forget that. But by God they remember in the end.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon)

July 28, 2015

A little context for James Brown’s claim to be the Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness:

You thought that was just a slogan. Live at the Apollo was at least James Brown’s twenty-fourth show of that week. The Apollo Theater had four or sometimes even five shows a day, starting in the early afternoon, and the revue had been playing there since Friday the 19th. At that point, and through most of the ‘60s, the James Brown revue was playing around three hundred days a year. (Three hundred days a year. Four or five shows a day.) No venue was too tiny, no drive between gigs that was physically possible to make was too long. 

That’s from Douglas Wolk’s book on Live at the Apollo from the 33 1/3 series. I’ve been reading the hell out of these this summer and the Live at the Apollo on is definitely the best so far. I had sort of forgotten how much I like to read music criticism.

Here’s a pretty good list of the best ones in the series: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_completist/2014/09/_33_1_3_books_the_30_best_from_aretha_franklin_to_neutral_milk_hotel.html

These posts about explorers and the wilderness reminded me of the movie that came out a couple of years ago called Meek’s Cutoff. It’s about pioneers taking the Oregon trail in the 1850′s. At some point, they lose the trail and get lost and then bicker about how to find their way again. 

As a kid, I was obsessed with the 1970′s Oakland Raiders. I found Kenny Stabler’s autobiography Snake at a used bookstore when I was in Seventh Grade  and must have read it a half dozen times. 

In retrospect, it is a really sad book - just a washed-up dude telling endless glory days stories. There’s a lot about partying with his Raider buddies, chasing girls, and playing great despite being wickedly hungover. 

But, if I am remembering right, a biiiiig chunk of the book concerned The Snake’s post-football activities which were, mainly, racing speedboats and fishing. I remember that Kenny Stabler’s favored fishing method was to go out on a boat with a redneck buddy and throw dynamite in the water until dead fish floated to the surface. But after the Ranger caught them, they switched to an electric coil connected to a car battery so the fish would be electrocuted but the Ranger couldn’t hear it so they were in the clear. Fun times on the Bayou.  

French priests taken prisoner by Native American in the 1600′s had it tough:

André's experience among them was of the roughest. The staple of his diet was acorns and tripe de roche,—a species of lichen, which, being boiled, resolved itself into a black glue, nauseous, but not void of nourishment. At times, he was reduced to moss, the bark of trees, or moccasins and old moose-skins cut into strips and boiled.

F. Parkman. LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West

Louis Hennepin was captured by the Sioux. It did not go well. The first meeting was inauspicious

The warriors had seated themselves in a ring, to debate on the fate of the Frenchmen; and two chiefs presently explained to the friar, by significant signs, that it had been resolved that his head should be split with a war-club. This produced the effect which was no doubt intended. Hennepin ran to the canoe, and quickly returned with one of the men, both loaded with presents, which he threw into the midst of the assembly; and then, bowing his head, offered them at the same time a hatchet with which to kill him, if they wished to do so.

His gifts and his submission seemed to appease them. They gave him and his companions a dish of beaver's flesh; but, to his great concern, they returned his peace-pipe,—an act which he interpreted as a sign of danger. That night the Frenchmen slept little, expecting to be murdered before morning.

For another thing, Hennepin was short and stumpy and couldn’t walk fast enough for the Native’s taste. In order to get him and his friends to hurry, the Sioux would literally light a fire under their ass:

Being, says Hennepin, exceedingly tall and active, they walked at a prodigious speed, insomuch that no European could long keep pace with them . . .  They swam the larger streams, and Hennepin nearly perished with cold as he emerged from the icy current. His two companions, who were smaller than he, and who could not swim, were carried over on the backs of the Indians.

Apparently, the opening lyrics of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row are less imagistic or “stream-of-consciousness” than I had thought.

In case you forgot, he sings “They’re selling postcards of the hanging/ they’re painting the passports brown/ the beauty parlor is filled with sailors/ the circus is in town“

Dylan is referring - although obliquely - to a violent lynching that took place in Duluth, Minnesota in 1920. The victims were three African American circus workers who, according to the rumor, had raped a teenage girl.

According to wikipedia, in June 1920, a eighteen-year-old Duluth kid claimed that six circus workers robbed him and raped his nineteen-year-old girlfriend. The Sheriff arrested six workers identified by the teens and held them in the city jail.

A doctor, who examined the girl, found no evidence of assault or rape, but the newspapers stories about the accusation and wild rumors spread throughout town that the girl had died. The next night, thousands of enraged Duluth-ers formed a mob outside the jail. The police essentially stood down and let the mob grab three of the prisoners. The mob then “convicted” the men in a sham trial and hanged them on the corner of 1st Street and 2nd Avenue. Dylan’s dad lived two blocks away.

The “postcard of the hanging” is below the fold. it is grisly. The postcard continued to be sold proudly in Duluth up through Dylan’s childhood in the 1950′s.

The city put up a monument to the three victims in 2003.

This is a smart article by Matthew Perpetua about the cultural death of rock and roll. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how rock music has marginalized itself by becoming convinced that it doesn’t matter anymore. This idea starts somewhere in the ‘90s, but really takes hold in the early ‘00s. It manifests itself in many ways – a majority of rock artists preferring to be niche than aim for a larger mainstream audience, bands embracing a retro pastiche sound with the implication that “it’s all been done,” musicians favoring electronic instruments and/or folky aesthetics because they want to distance themselves from “rock.”

One of the smartest things I’ve ever read about rock music, or any kind of performative art for that matter, was a thing a pre-Sonic Youth Kim Gordonwrote in Art Forum about a PiL show in 1983: “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” It’s really as simple as that. When rock musicians, en masse, decided that the didn’t believe in their own genre, a lot of people who cared about self-belief moved on to hip-hop, a genre obsessed with self-affirmation, and EDM, which is about people coming together to will a transcendent experience into existence. And they embraced pop divas, who have all the same iconic swagger as the old rock stars. They paid to see different people believe in themselves.

I think this is right. One of the best shows I have ever seen was LCD Soundsystem at Pitchfork four or five years ago. It was an amazing - great songs from a great band at the peak of their powers outdoors on a really hot night. But it was striking how resistant the band - well, really the singer James Murphy - were to seizing the moment. They seemed to be embarrassed by how rabid the crowd was and took steps to tamp down the enthusiasm by getting the best songs out of the way early and closing. The songs were so good, though, that id didn’t matter. It was weird - a great show despite the band’s best efforts. 

This, from Matt Yglesias on slavery and the civil war, is really smart:

It's popular these days to establish that the Civil War was about slavery by citing the southern states' official secession documents. That's all fair enough, but the truth is that people say lots of crazy things in official documents. The real proof that the war was about slavery is how the war was conducted, which is to say with an eye more toward plantation-owners holding on to their property (including their human chattel) than toward liberating the south from northern domination. That's why there is no guerilla strategy on the Confederate side. And it's why, in the end, the Confederate elite surrenders when their formal army is beaten. If you go hide in the hills, your slaves are going to run away. If you refuse to give in even after the North has beaten your army, you are going to have your large estates confiscated.

They fought as long and hard as they could with a strategy consistent with maintaining slavery, and when that strategy didn't work they pivoted to a strategy consistent with maintaining the plantations. Then they rebuilt the basic architecture of white supremacy.

This is from Yglesias’s newsletter which is much, much better than the stuff he typically writes for Vox.com. It’s more like his old blog- typos and all.