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Mighty ARVN
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/migh...Mighty ARVN 10 May 2008 12:13 pm George WIll reviews Rick Perlstein's masterpiece, Nixonland and picks a very strange nit: "Calling South Vietnams army 'a joke' is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for
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Does This Remind You Of Somebody We know?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/020914.htmlDoes This Remind You Of Somebody We know? Posted by Christopher Manion at 09:23 AM "Whereas in 1960 22,000 people donated to John KennedyÃ's campaign and 44,000 to Richard NixonÃ's, in 1964 Goldwater had more than a million contributors. A mass
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The best sentence I read today, circa 6:36 a.m.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/05...Nixon, who became vice president at age 40, was well described as an old mans idea of a young man. That is from this review of Nixonland, a book which is rapidly approaching the top of my pile.
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Perslstein’s Book “Nixonland”: Subject of AoTP Chat Wed at 7 p.m. EDT
http://www.theartofthepossible.net/2008/08/12/perslsteins-bo...As previously announced, tomorrow, Wednesday, at 7 p.m. EST we welcome Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, to AoTP chat. This review (by the conservative Ross Douthat) in The Atlantic points out why it has been nearly impossible for yours truly to read the book in time (obtained only last Friday) for her own-full-fledged review: Any book that rolls Woodstock and Watergate, the death of RFK and the Tet Offensive, Jane Fonda and George Wallace, and a cast of thousands more into a mere 800 pages or so is bound to sprawl and sag a bit, to rush too quickly through some topics and linger too long with others. That is true — about the length — but I found little “sagginess.” Anyway, length should not deter a single soul from reading the book. For as The Atlantic review goes on to enthuse: Even so, Nixonland reads marvelously. [...] [Perlstein] has the eye of a great documentarian, fastening not only on the obvious historical set pieces (Kent State, Watts, Attica), but on the not-so-obvious ones as well. Those who did not live through the violent social upheaval of 1960s America, as I did, especially ought read this book; one cannot understand the next several decades of American political history without grasping how frightening and divisive this period was. Perlstein sets it all out in necessarily lengthy detail, but with great clarity and style that almost always precludes losing the reader’s interest. The Atlantic, again: The hinge of the book is a chapter-length account of the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, told from the vantage point of the American living room—a scene-by-scene, blow-by-blow account of what the average American might have seen if he or she had flicked on NBC at a quarter past four on the day Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president. It’s the most riveting description of a television broadcast you’ll ever read. [...] Perlstein depicts a country on the edge of a civil war—a nation in which columnists openly speculated that America might embrace a de Gaulle–style man on horseback, or find a “President Verwoerd” (the architect of South African apartheid) to install in the Oval Office. It was a political moment when the old order could no longer govern, and the new order wasn’t ready. The kids who screamed for Goldwater and McGovern would grow up to be responsible Reaganites and Clintonians, but back then they had only idealism, not experience, and Nixonland is an 800-page testament to the dangers of idealism run amok. In this climate, the voters didn’t choose Nixon over some neoconservative or neoliberal FDR; no such figure was available. They chose Nixon over an exhausted establishment on the one hand—nobody seems more hapless in Nixonland than figures like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller—and the fantasy politics of left and right on the other. They chose Nixon over the abyss. The Economist review declares: Mr Perlstein’s biggest contribution to his subject is to set Nixon’s private resentments in the context of a broader culture of resentment. “Nixonland” is a study of how the consensus of the early 1960s turned into the cacophony of the late 1960s, when “regular” white Americans found everything they held dear thrown into question: threatened by black activists, looked down upon by pointy-headed intellectuals, vilified by student radicals, corroded by a rising tide of lawlessness and vulgarity and fatally challenged not just by the anti-war movement but also by America’s failure to achieve its aims in Vietnam. As far as Nixon’s supporters were concerned, the swinging sixties were the seething sixties. Mr Perlstein rightly points out that many people supported Nixon not in spite of his boiling rage but precisely because of it. [. . . ] It is hard, in the current political season, to read this book without hearing the sound of history rhyming, to paraphrase Mark Twain. Maybe, rhyming. But more? Let’s proceed. The New York Times Sunday Book Review, in a mixed review, notes: Because the baby boomers’ self-absorption is so ample, there already has been no shortage of brooding about those years. We do, however, benefit from the brooding by Perlstein, who is not a boomer, for two reasons. First, he has a novelist’s, or perhaps an anthropologist’s, eye for illuminating details, as in his jaw-dropping reconstruction of the Newark riots of July 1967. Second, his thorough excavation of the cultural detritus of that decade refutes his thesis, which is that now, as then, Americans are at daggers drawn. (It is the above point in which I especially look forward to hearing Mr. Perlstein defend his thesis. Has polarization in American politics — if not ever been thus — not rather often been? Is today’s really comparable to the gross societal fracturing of the 60s?) Finally, the NYT succinctly describes a central organizing theme to which Perlstein returns again and again in his book, to wit: Orthogonians v. the Franklins: Per Rosetta stone for deciphering Nixon’s dark personality is a distinction he acknowledges borrowing from Chris Matthews’s 1996 book “Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America.” Arriving at Whittier College, Nixon, “a serial collector of resentments,” found that the clique of cool students was called Franklins, so he helped organize the Orthogonians for people such as himself — strivers who would try to ascend by grit rather than grace. Perlstein repeatedly explains Nixon’s or other people’s behavior as arising from an Orthogonian resentment of Franklins, including establishment figures as different as Alger Hiss and Nelson Rockefeller. I am enjoying the book immensely, even as one who is not exactly to the left as is Perlstein. But he is no partisan hack, and Nixonland is the work of a scholar that repays the time it takes to absorb.
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E. coli Conservatism and Apocalypse Chow
http://haphazardgourmet.blogspot.com/2008/07/e-coli-conserva...Eric Lotke, research director for the Campaign For America's Future, has a riveting editorial in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, The Haphazard Gourmet Girls' "hometown" newspaper. Mr. Lotke parses E. coli conservatism, which is historian Rick Perlstein's term for a perpetually shrinking federal government that leaves citizens exposed to all kinds of harm in the name of free market competition. Mr. Perlstein's newish Nixonland is currently on the bestseller lists for political books; the tome attempts to explain (among other things...) how as a nation we wound up in a situation in which massive capitalist Foodie Industrial Complex entities are allowed to freely poison the population, with lax monitoring by the hamstrung Fed agencies that supposably exist to protect us. Our fave quote from Mr. Lotke's piece: In a 2007 interview in USA Today, William Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner, admitted that food safety had become a crap shoot: "The FDA has so few resources, all it can do is target high-risk things, give a pass to everything else and hope it is OK. ... The public probably has the perception ... that they're more protected than they really are." One of the outcomes of E. coli conservatism? Private citizens are forced to become aggressive watchdogs of the nation's Food Supply, and Food Safety is not regulated by the government; rather, victims--or the families of dead victims--are compensated financially, and the nation's courts are loaded with Foodie litigation. Yesterday we noted Bill Marler of the law firm of Marler Clark as The Avenging Angel of the Chowpocalypse; the bulk of Marler Clark's practice is comprised of food poisoning and contamination litigation. "Put me out of business," is Mr. Clark's now-famous plea to the Meat industry he has repeatedly sued over E. coli outbreaks. But it won't happen any time soon.... Read Mr. Lotke's full editorial here. Our advice for where your complaints about Food Safety Regulations can be registered with the Feds is here.
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How the Media Learned to Bend Over Backward to Please the Right-- LIVE
http://www.groupnewsblog.net/2008/07/how-media-learned-to-be...Panel / Fri, 07/18/2008 - 1:30pm, Exhibit Hall 4 Once upon a time, dramatic TV coverage of showdowns in Birmingham and Selma made the media equal partners in the struggle to civilize America. After the 1968 Democratic Convention,however, executives startled to learn that most Americans reviled the media for "taking the protesters' side" set in motion the broken mainstream media dynamic of today: bending over backward to please a mythic "middle America," patronizing even the most popular liberal political expressions as "elitist." Building on Rick Perlstein's NIXONLAND, this panel will explore this pattern's causes and consequences, and whether and how online activism might change it. PANELISTS: Paul Krugman, "Digby" Parton, Rick Perlstein, Duncan Black Great panel featuring some more big brains of the media, writing and blogosphere. Digby started out by dedicating this Panel to Molly Ivans. (recieved with a great deal of applause) Rick Pearlstein starting out by giving context to the modern corp. media based on the research he did for his Bestselling book NIXONLAND. Great quotes from his book giving a historical background for this topic. Next up: Paul Krugman. He started out saying he doesn't really have info on what kind of pressure was being brought to bear. Over time it is clear that the people who noticed something was wrong before a crisis... are the ones no one asks to comment when the crisis happens. This does not encourage people to speak out in the media as they see the news or the indications of events on the horizon. Happened with Iraq, and the housing bubble. Very little of the pressure seems to come directly from the White House or gop. Instead the news, pressure and talking points are being put out from side groups that are basically unofficial extensions. This comes from Truth Squad publications like the National Review. Pressure that comes in the form of mail. Hostile mails get to journalists. And there are coordinated efforts to do this. Happened to Krugman during the debates about privatizing social security. This does seem to put pressure on reporters. Beyond that there is out right character asasination. NEXT Duncan Black, Atrios for 30 years or so, Liberal News Media and Elite has been the meme. -Doesn't think that the media are in touch with the common man. Though they like to think they are. - We do have elites, but they are not liberal elites. - sympathetic to the Christian right. Media did not reflect the world view. And this was true about us to. The netroots also don't feel like our views are being reflected back to us on TV. - 'Liberal' Media does not really have liberal values. Look at how Olbermann is treated for being a liberal in the so-called liberal media. We need to create a storm when the media goes wrong. We need to cause a lot of noise to get their attention. It would be great if we didn't have to but we do. The right has known that media activism was a core part of their movement, and we need to realize that this has to be a core part of our movement. UP Now Digby; Points out we need to see and recognize the 30 years of this issue. And the meaning of our political discourse has been shaped by this history. They have created the myth of the Liberalism. We need to find ways to expose what we see. Point out the village, and village elders who are telling us what to do, are really a group of high paid media personalities and world leaders. They are not our village elders they are actually talking down to the american public and our job is to poke holes in these myths.
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The $131.09 Perlstein Paperback
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/the-13109-perl...The $131.09 Perlstein Paperback By Mick Sussman I had never gotten around to reading “Before the Storm,” Rick Perlstein’s 2001 book on Barry Goldwater and the rise of the conservative movement. So when Perlstein’s follow-up, “Nixonland,” came out this spring, I decided to read them in sequence. But when I visited Amazon last week I found that “Before the Storm” was available only through five used booksellers, at prices ranging from $131.09 to $184.02. I could imagine paying that kind of money for an autographed “Augie March” or a first-edition Faulkner, but a Perlstein paperback? How did the booksellers arrive at these figures, which seemed prohibitively high and oddly precise (would it have been $131.10 had one fewer page been dog-eared by the original owner)? And why wouldn’t at least one seller have tried to undercut the others? I e-mailed the store proprietors to find out. Laurie Ward, the owner of Looking For Mister Goodbook, who was offering an “acceptable” quality ex-library hardcover copy of “Before the Storm” for $149, speculated that Perlstein’s book was “prematurely taken out of print.” Exactly how “Before the Storm” originally came to be valued in the hundred-plus-dollar range remained a mystery. Both Ms. Ward and another bookseller who got back to me, Carolyn B. King of QueenKing, said that they chose their price by aiming somewhere between the high and low range of what was available on Amazon. Ms. Ward explained that if she had come in with a much lower figure, she would have been undercut almost immediately. Many booksellers use software like RepriceIt that automatically adjusts the price to keep ahead of competitors. Counterintuitively, the use of autopricing software actually seems to stabilize the going rate. Any lowball offer prompts an instantaneous machine-driven race to the bottom. But once one book is sold below market value, noted Ms. Ward, the price will then “‘cycle’ back around” to the equilibrium level. The widespread recognition of this dynamic deters experienced sellers from bothering to make lowball offers in the first place. The finely shaded prices I’
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http://humanvacuum.blogspot.com/2008/07/best-non-fiction-boo...
The best non-fiction book I've read this year is Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. George Will's right: Perlstein loves the melodramatic apercu, and he doesn't have show much respect for conservatism besides acknowledging the masterly way in which it exploited a cultural moment; but reading Nixonland a few weeks after Sean Willentz's Age of Reagan -- another book by a liberal scion assessing the conservative ascendancy of the last 30 years -- I'm not sure how else conservatives could have, to use the jargon of the day, "positioned" themselves otherwise. As repugnant as most of the language and attitudes struck by organizers of the so-called New Politics and New Left were, as blinkered as they were to how badly Nixon's Silent Majority received their hopes for racial/social harmony, the demagogues of the right surpassed them in deviousness and stridency, creating a world in which the smiling face of Ronald Reagan could render Nixonism obsolete while consolidating its strategies (liberals AND conservatives forget how defiant then-Governor Reagan of California looked in the face of student revolt; he struck an almost Maoist pose of adamantine resistance: authority incarnate. Regardless, Nixonland reads like the best novel Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal never wrote. It begins with an unexpected juxtaposition: Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act -- buttressed by the knowledge that he's just won one of the greatest popular landslides in American history -- five days before the first series of Watts riots begins. His ludicrous claim that these were "the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem" was the most politically obtuse statement made by this most brutally effective of post-New Deal politicians. Smelling blood, two-time loser and former vice president Richard Nixon began the latest, most personally demeaning, and, ultimately, greatest demonstration of what Garry Wills once called his talent for mobilizing resentment towards those in power. From Perlstein's own afterword: I have written of the rise, between the years 1965 and 1972, of a nation that had had believed itself to be at consensus instead becoming one of incommensurate visions of apocalypse: two loosely defined congeries of Americans, each convinced that should the other triumph, everything decent and true and worth preserving would end.A bit pretentious, this, especially if we remember that sneaky old Thomas Jefferson undermined his two presidential predecessors by paying surrogates in the press to run smears. But Jefferson never attended conventions as riotous as the '68 and '72 ones hosted by the Democrats. We're all a little more conservative now, so the incendiary language and Dada stunts pulled on the floor of the '72 convention strikes me as submission, as playing to the GOP's worst suspicions. Perlstein's point is that, as residents of Nixonland, we accept the cynicism of modern politics without blinking -- a dubious development to say the least. Let's just say that Tricky Dick might have approved of Obama's FISA bill reversal.
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Nixonland
http://mainstusa.blogspot.com/2008/06/nixonland.htmlNixonland by Rick Perlstein is the next political book I want to read. Here's the Amazon.com review: Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a "Silent Majority" that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater's massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style--equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson--that's true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian's empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon's cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they'll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear. --Tom Nissley He was on Morning McCain on MSNBC and went toe to toe with Nixon henchman, racist Pat Buchanan. Watch the video here. Digby loved the book. The New York Times assigned George F. Will to review it. Guess what he thought? Read his scathing review here. If George Will hates it, I need to read it.
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