Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
Whew... just looked at the opening of that video. Sarah Palin is scary. Bachmann is just plain weird.
ReplyDeleteThis Tea Party phenomenon seems like fascism under a new guise.
ReplyDeleteWhat interests me is why she's going into these long asides on slavery at a meeting on taxation (without making some obvious statement that taxation is slavery or some such nonsense).
ReplyDeleteThe talking heads say it's because the Tea Party wants to prove that the Founders were infallible but I wonder if that's really what they are getting at. It can't be a coincidence that there is a man with African roots in the White House, but I'm having a hard time putting that puzzle piece into the picture.
I just finished a fascinating book on the origins of Charlie Chan. The author has an aside in there about how the movies picked up the "yellow peril" idea in both titles and plots. The Manchurian Candidate is supposed to kill the the nominee when he mentions the word "liberty" -- which he notes was a Cold War buzzword.
This Tea Party business seems to be running on some kind of parallel Cold War tracks.
Certainly playing into the same fears. It is appalling the way they have lashed out at Obama. Birthers represent nearly one-half of all Republicans, and the overwhelming majority of Teabagggers, judging by the nasty outbursts. They simply can't stand the idea of a black man leading the country.
ReplyDeleteYet, at the same time they seem to be trying to make an appeal to Hispanic voters, which I guess is where this notion of a country "founded" on equal rights is coming from. Hell, Bachman wouldn't have even been able to vote back then, much less run for office. But, she probably doesn't know that women's suffrage didn't come till 1920, or Scalia's recent cracks on women's rights.
She's an idiot--an insult to her constituency and just plain uneducated in history. She couldn't psss the test to become a citizen. Is stupdity a qualification for tea party membership--a grade school student would not have made the remarks she did....Have we all gone madd!!!!
ReplyDeleteFolks, Palin and Bachmann are Coulter clones. Coulter made it safe for every member of the republican party to come out of the bigot closet.
ReplyDeleteI would think that Palin, Bachman and Coulter would be insults to Republican women. After all, they have and have had strong women within their party like Elizabeth Dole, Christine Todd Whitman and Kay Bailey Hutchinson. But, this new generation is like something out of the Stepford Wives.
ReplyDeleteOne would think . . .
ReplyDeleteI just heard last night about Sarah Palin claiming the Soviet Union fell because of Sputnik and the cost of the space program.
ReplyDeleteGeez, and I thought Reagan had defeated the Soviet Union ; )
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