Dispatches from Vilnius

I was watching Carville plug his book on CNN a couple weeks ago.  Here is an interview from the Rachel Maddow Show , discussing It's the Middle Class, Stupid! which has arrived on the bookshelves just in time for the 2012 campaign.  For all the lip service the Republicans have given the Middle Class, I haven't seen one proposal that would actually benefit them.  Carville was also tough on Barry O.  Probably won't influence too many voters, but Carville is always fun to listen to.

Priceless video with Johnson offering Truman the first Medicare card.

Way off topic, but .... I'm not one to follow the Olympics but after seeing snippets of China's opening ceremonies, and wishing I'd seen the entire show, I tuned in for London. Wouldn't have missed this for anything! A celebration of National Health and children's literature (and Kenneth Branagh reciting Shakespeare). Wonder-full. I wonder if Americans were paying attention.

At 800+ pages, probably more Cronkite than most anyone would want to read.  In today's newscape, dear Walter seems like a long distant memory, but Brinkley does his best to rekindle interest in perhaps the news media's most beloved anchorman.

I read the first chapter of Glenn Beck's Cowards out of curiosity.  I no longer get appalled by such ramblings.  Actually, I find them quite amusing, especially when he holds up Harding and Coolidge as "true conservatives," while admonishing Hoover for trying to fight the Depression, which these swell guys wrought, with "stimulus plans."  One chapter was enough. Another book making the facebook rounds is The Communist , which embellishes the relationship between Obama and Frank Mashall Davis ,  The "brilliant" historian, Paul Kengor, suggests that young Barry, who affectionately called Davis "Frank" in his memoir,  Dreams From My Father,  did so in a conspiratorial sense, implying a deep-seated Communist plot here.   The Manchurian Candidate all over again. I would have thought after all the attempts to paint Obama as a radical Socialist, and Progressives as Communists, that we would see an end to these conspiratorial themes, but...

Bob Dylan loved nothing more than to shake up a crowd .  Here he is at Newport in 1965 when he went electric, much to the chagrin of his devoted fans.

This documentary offers a penetrating look into the financial crisis of 2008, chronicling the 28 years of banking deregulation that led to it and the fallout of the crisis.  Charles Ferguson won an Oscar for his efforts.    Here's Charlie Rose interviewing Ferguson.  Avrds supplied a link on vimeo  to the full documentary.  Seems to work best on Google Chrome.  It is well worth watching.

I'm reminded of the Warren Zevon song , as no doubt the NRA is arming itself for another battle royale in the wake of the Aurora Colorado shooting .  Calls for gun control have once again been issued, but Obama and Democratic governors don't seem too anxious to press the case, especially after the Supreme Court voted down municipal gun laws in the District of Columbia .  Gun posts have appeared all over my facebook page the past few days, citing the second amendment.  A popular one is "we don't need gun control, we need idiot control."  Yet each year nearly 10,000 firearm related homicides take place in the United States, ranking  fourth in the world behind such violent countries as South Africa, Columbia and Thailand.

" It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building." This DVD was a pleasant find .  I'm a big fan of Louis Sullivan.  His story is a fascinating one.  He grounded his ideas in Walt Whitman's poetry, hoping to create a truly American architecture.  He was also interested in Germanic philosophers like Hegel, and established links with leading European architects of his time like Adolph Loos. In many ways, his life mirrored that of the architect in Ibsen's The Master Builder , which inspired me to turn my architectural thesis on the relationship between Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright into a play. Pictured above is a corner of the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, New York.  One of his gems.  Very glad to see renewed interest in Sullivan.

I was looking forward to a good political thriller, but found myself sadly disappointed with The Ides of March .  There were some good moments like when Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, Paul Zara, tells his young protegee how he stuck by a candidate even when he had no chance in winning, because he valued loyalty, but otherwise there aren't any memorable quotes .  Too bad, because it had a good cast and all the trappings of a good political thriller. The film was supposedly based on the play, Farragut North , by Beau Willimon.  Whereas Willimon dealt principally with the failed campaign of Howard Dean, Clooney decided to make his fictional political candidate a cross between Bill Clinton and John Edwards, more concerned with infidelity than the broken dreams of a presidential campaign.  Neither compares to Michael Ritchie's The Candidate , to read the NYT's review of the play.

As the election rhetoric heats up, I'm reminding of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .  How long ago that seems today.  I was only 11 at the time, but it was the first campaign I took an interest in, largely because "Scoop" Jackson was from Washington, my home state.  Thompson skewers Jackson and just about everyone else in this book.  He was particularly harsh on Hubert Humphrey for some reason.  McGovern survives unscathed, even if his campaign went down in flames. What a convention that was!  It unleashed a Pandora's Box of pent-up emotions and hostilities, leading to irrevocable breaks in the rank and file.   I read the paperback years ago, but was lucky enough to find a first edition at a reasonable price at Abebooks.

I have to say I developed a soft spot for Ron Paul during this election cycle and was sorry to see him miss out on the minimum number of delegates necessary to ensure him a speaking role at the GOP convention.  His was often been the only voice of reason on the Republican political trail.  Not that I particularly agree with him, but he knew how to put forward a strong argument. He had been the darling of the Tea Party when it first sprouted in 2009, thanks largely to his book, The Revolution , in which he laid out his political and economic agenda.  He was the sole Libertarian  and the frontrunner for the GOP nomination until the religious fundamentalists took over the Tea Party and the campaign in general.  Of course, you knew this love affair with Paul couldn't last, but still he managed to build a loyal following and amass almost enough delegates to put him on the GOP podium, while other Republican challengers fell to the wayside. I guess the q...

Any suggestions for the next reading group?

Here's a review of a 2010 book on Betsy Ross and the Making of America , Most historians dismiss the story about Betsy Ross making the first American flag. Yet despite a century of debunking, the legend ­endures. Across the country, schoolchildren still cut out five-pointed stars using the pattern that Ross, a Philadelphia flag maker, supposedly invented. The legend endures because publishers, souvenir sellers and patriotic boosters find it useful and because it fills a void in the American epic. Nations need heroines. Betsy Ross gives women a place in the national pantheon without disrupting our dominant myths. In other words, history made safe ; ) Happy Fourth of July everyone!

Harry Truman first proposed a National Health Care Program on November 19, 1945, and thanks to a surprising vote from Judge John Roberts the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been upheld in the Supreme Court.  This is a great victory!

The car has long held a special place in the American imagination. This looks like a fun book, Engines of Change , in which, Mr. Ingrassia, the deputy editor in chief of Reuters, is a former Detroit bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal (and the brother of Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor of The New York Times). In this book he draws upon his expertise covering the car business to give us a highly informed but breezy narrative history of the vehicles that have shaped and reflected American culture. Along the way he also gives us some sharp snapshots of the engineers, businessmen and ad people who helped design and promote these automobiles, men like Harley Earl, who led General Motors’ design department for three decades, “from the Jazz Age to the Space Age,” and John DeLorean, the fast-living engineer and executive behind Pontiac’s GTO, “the meanest street-legal car in America,” and behind his own company’s DMC-12, the stainless-steel roadster with gull-wing doors b...

This is one of the books that Caro refers to in describing the mutual contempt between Johnson and Robert Kennedy.  There is another one entitled Bad Blood , but it doesn't get as good reviews.

The Passage of Power is Caro's fourth book in his cycle on Lyndon Johnson.  As David Greenberg notes in his review for the Washington Post , Caro strives for the epic. He will make a book, or chapter, or anecdote as long as it has to be to achieve his desired effect — elongating even a single sentence, if necessary, and then stitching it together with a passel of colons, semicolons and dashes,  as if scooped by the handful from his handyman’s belt.   He is indeed aiming for the monumental, as this book takes in 6 tumultuous years of Johnson's ascension to President, but first having to endure the ignominy of the Vice-Presidency he found himself thrust into, and a lesser role than he imagined for himself in the Kennedy administration.  He considered himself a "cut dog."  Caro finds the humor and pathos of this difficult time in Johnson's rise to power, making for highly enjoyable reading.  He provides an added layer of depth to what already is...

Pynchon started his epic early American tale with Mason and Dixon viewing the Transit of Venus in South Africa.  The 6-hour passage of Venus across the surface of the sun was used to help calculate longitude in 1761.  There were simultaneous observations in Russia and across Europe, but apparently none in the Americas.  M&D were in America from 1763-68.  The next Transit of Venus was in 1769 when Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche set himself up in Mexico to record the event, but died of fever shortly thereafter.   Captain Cook observed the event from the island of Tahiti in 1769, while on his first voyage of discovery.

First it was Killing Lincoln , now Bill O'Reilly plans on Killing Kennedy this fall.  What gives?  I read the first chapters in the amazon preview of Killing Lincoln and it was so banal.  The book reminded me of the biographies I read in elementary school, with American historical figures reduced to a set of anecdotes broken up with illustrations to make reading easy.  I suppose for the persons who tune into the O'Reilly Factor, this is appropriate reading level, but at least O'Reilly doesn't pretend to be an historian, unlike his fellow conservative pundit, Glenn Beck, who has blessed us with his evangelical account of George Washington .  Here is Glenn and David Barton on GBTV chewing the fat over which founding father is harder to pin down, Old George or Doubtiing Thomas.