Yesterday at TPMCafe, Rick Perlstein kicked off a week-long examination of his new book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. I’ve been asked to join this week’s cafe (a fun departure from writing about politics through a feminist lens), and I recommend checking it out, because the book is wonderful. And very relevant to today’s post topic: “Reagan Democrats“. The seeds of creation for this group of voters means they’re probably more “Nixon Democrats”, a name that would at least show how fruitless getting them back into the fold might be.

Ezra’s post gently puts to rest the ancient Democratic hobbyhorse of lamenting the loss of that percentage of white working class voters that long ago quit voting their economic interests and started voting against uppity black people and women, and against the “liberal elite”. Interestingly, the “elite” label doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to liberals—the lower you go on the income ladder, the more liberal you tend to be statistically speaking:



So why do Republicans win when (because of Republican policies no less), the number of people falling below the cutoff line greatly outnumbers the people falling above it? In part, because the higher you get up the income ladder, the more likely you are to vote. Also, there’s racial issues (gender a bit less, because while women are more liberal than men, they also vote more regularly, so it probably evens out):

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Other people who saw through “states’ rights”

God, I couldn’t be more sick of the disingenuous “states’ rights” argument, now being whipped out on the gay marriage decision in California. It’s bizarre watching wingnuts get into a self-righteous huff about the all-important rights of states, when they only care about it when dismissing the fundamental rights of people. Which of course is never explicitly said, but that’s the point of it: “States’ rights” only seem to matter to people who feel the states can do a better job of oppressing the people than the federal government can. Should the federal government take the opportunity to wield power against individual rights—as they did with the federal ban on certain kinds of late term abortions—nary a peep to be heard from the people who have great love for the right of states, but not for people.

It just so happens that I started reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. In it, he quoted LBJ’s speech supporting the civil rights movement on March 15, 1965. I thought Johnson’s contempt for the “states’ rights” argument has some relevance right now.

There is no issue of state’s rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

Blunt and to the point, as was his habit. With the gay marriage debate, you have the opposition forever arguing that the institutions set up to serve the people should take precedence over the people they’re meant to serve. The institution of marriage—at least the conservative definition of it—is supposed to be so sacrosanct that it can’t be modified to serve the very people marriage is supposed to serve. The government is not about serving the interests of the people, all of the people, but about just mindless oppression in the name of rights held by institutions that have no reason to exist without the people.

I mean, it’s obviously bullshit. But it’s such tenacious bullshit, and I have to wonder how many people who spout off about “states’ rights” honestly think the state is something that exists for its own sake and that it has rights above and beyond the rights of the human beings it’s meant to serve. 5%? 2%? 80%? What’s the stupid to evil ratio on this argument? How many of them realize that they’re echoing an argument that was reinvigorated to deny black people the right to vote? How many of them feel twinges of guilt, and how many would probably get on board with the idea that the state should be able to deny the right to vote on the basis of race? I am honestly curious about this.

Creepy bastard Rulon Jeffs poses with his newly acquired wives shortly before he died of old age.

William Saletan has two posts up about the slippery slope threats made by conservatives regarding gay marriage—basically, that if we allow that, then polygamy and incest are next. Saletan agrees with the slippery slope argument, but doesn’t think it’s a bad thing to switch from the taboo model of managing human sexual relations to the harm reduction/privacy model that he thinks is the groundwork for homosexuality. I’m not saying that he’s strictly wrong in his views on tolerance of cousins marrying or polygamy—consenting adults and all that—but I think his assumptions about the groundwork that made same-sex marriage possible is all off, and it taints his argument.

I don’t think that same-sex marriage is becoming more socially acceptable because people are more interested in privacy. I think it’s a matter of increasing egalitarianism and feminism especially. And so I strongly disagree with him that the tides are turning towards more social acceptance of cousin marriage and polygamy.

Cousin marriage doesn’t really seem to be a feminist issue, but the implication that Saletan is trotting out—that there’s some tide turning in favor of allowing it—goes against history in a big way. Saletan has got to know this, since he trots out cousin marriers like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. In half the states of the U.S., marrying your first cousin is legal, and those are the sort of laws that hang on from the past, and are not recent innovations that stem from increasing tolerance. The incest taboo in American and Western European cultures has recently expanded to cover first cousin incest,* and my sense of it is that it’s a result of people’s greater mobility and urbanity. We just meet a lot more people than in the rural past. We have high school, college, and internet dating now. Cousin marriage has become a marker of severe social isolation and backwardness.

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God, I’m so scared this will turn out to be a forgery, but let’s hope not. I mean, it makes perfect sense that Einstein would have been an atheist, but he’s been held up by religious people as a “good” guy who said all the right things about how god is real and great and the universe is beyond comprehension, that part of me has bought into it. Maybe he issued pandering statements in public but felt differently in private?

But what really makes this letter awesome is that he doesn’t play around.

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this,” he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper……

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,” he said.

“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.”

Please let this be true. It’s just so awesome.

The emergency room at hospitals are surreal places, and I always wonder how people who work there full time deal with it. One broken bottle of salsa on our tile floor, one misplaced foot, one aborted attempt to remove the sliver of glass with tweezers, one sinking realization that the attempts were just pushing it in further, and I find myself face down on a hospital bed with the doctor rolling up one of the bells on my cute new corduroy pants to keep from getting iodine and blood on them while he pulls out the sliver. Now I’m moving slowly and cautiously all along my left side, because not only does my foot hurt, but so does my entire left arm from the tetanus shot. To add to the surreal nature of my afternoon, after we got home, a short thunderstorm dumped giant, ill-formed hail all over our apartment complex, putting a dent in the top of my truck.

The hurry-up-and-wait nature of the E.R. meant I had a chance to finish Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. My mother gave me her copy a long time ago, and I figured with the recent raid on a polygamous cult in Texas, I should bone up on the information about Mormon fundamentalism inside this book. I found the book to be a fair book, empathetic towards why people are drawn to Mormonism and fascinated by the religion’s perseverance while pulling no punches in exposing how the history of the church breeds this conservatism that made the fundamentalists inevitable, along with the sexual abuse they dish out to young people of both sexes.

The ostensible purpose of the book is to chronicle the story of the Lafferty brothers, two men who, angry that the wife of their youngest brother was resisting their attempts to transform their entire family into a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon one, decided to murder her and her baby daughter. The daughter’s death was justified because of her gender; daughters of “bitches” grow up to be forbiddingly independent-minded women as well was the theory, a theory that makes more sense if you really understand the Mormon obsession with lineage. In telling this story, though, Krakauer also tells the story of how the LDS church evolved, especially how the doctrine of polygamy was, at various times, fiercely defended and just as fiercely rejected, depending on the need to either separate the Mormons from the mainstream of America, or to embrace it.*

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Pam posted yesterday about the passing of Mildred Loving, linking the struggle to legalize interracial marriage with the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. P.Z. put up a post demonstrating the religious wingnuttery that came into play in justifying the criminalization of the Lovings’ marriage, by quoting some of Mildred Loving’s account of the whole thing.

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

Taking the two together, it’s doubly clear not only are same-sex marriage rights linked with interracial marriage rights because they have arguments in common for them, but also because the opponents are the same assholes they’ve always been, using the same arguments that they always have. (In sum: “God shares my bigotry!”) The fight for interracial marriage was part of the culture wars, just like reproductive rights, gay rights, and the separation of church and state.

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A clip from my latest obsession.

SPOILAGE.

Tired of the movies, where women barely exist onscreen at all, and when they do, they’re treated like imbeciles or cardboard cutouts? The assumption in the movie industry is that men make the vast majority of the movie-seeing decisions, and that women are therefore a niche market that only needs a couple of intelligence-insulting bones thrown for a twice-annual girl’s night out.* But TV is another story. For whatever reason, it’s beginning to be understood that shows with fully realized female characters that have more going on than being fuckable and having babies do quite well on the small screen, thank you very much. And TV meets a variety of entertainment gaps that weren’t being filled. You have your fantasies of female empowerment that still aren’t realized in the everyday world—like on “Battlestar Galactica” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and you have shows that address women’s lives in an honest way, patriarchal warts and all, like on the comedy “Ugly Betty” and the drama “Mad Men”, which is a show that we power-chugged last week, watching most of the first season flying to and from New York.

The first season of “Mad Men” is set in 1960, which means it’s an exceedingly relevant program for modern times, because it’s this turning point in time that all culture war madness turns off of. When conservatives talk bitterly about the 60s, it’s because they romanticize the 50s as the ultimate moment of the American patriarchy, and to varying degrees, also the last gasp of blatant white supremacy, a utopia of white male dominance that was cruelly snatched away and needs to be restored through government intervention.

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Jill linked Ema’s awesome post about why Leslee Unruh and her cadre of crazy anti-choicers are very Communist in their thinking. I’m reading Glenn Greenwald’s newest book, and I have to say that this post really reminds me of his larger points about how right wingers all too often embody the very things they claim to hate. The official right wing reason to hate communism was that it was totalitarian, but the recent embrace of Soviet tactics demonstrates that it wasn’t the totalitarianism that was an issue so much at the lefty economics, as you might suspect.

The bill that Unruh and company are trying to pass into law could potentially ban birth control along with abortion, and it redefines biology in a way that would bring a tear to the eye of Soviets who thought natural selection was politically incorrect and had to go. It gives the government panty-sniffing power that would make the Stasi jealous. It redefines women’s bodies as property of the state in a way that the Chinese are taking notes.

But when red-baiting the anti-choicers, we mustn’t forget to mention the anti-choice communist utopia: Romania. Now there was a state that Leslee Unruh, Phill Kline and the whole cast of panty-sniffing misogynists could really get behind. Modern American anti-choicers make the same argument used in communist Romania to deprive women of basic rights: We aren’t having enough babies to sustain the economy! Under Nicolae Ceausescu, contraception and abortion were strictly banned unless you had already had four children and done your biological duty to the state. In a strong echo of our modern anti-choice community’s disconnect between what they actually think and what they say they think, it was widely believed that the contraception and abortion ban of Romania mostly functioned as a way for men in power to get off on controlling women. It certainly didn’t do anything to lower the abortion rate—under this regime, they had one of the highest abortion rates in Europe. Highest maternal mortality, too, which was a direct result of the high illegal abortion rate.

That’s the utopia they’re looking at with their communist-borrowing strategies. A world where a misogynist’s nose is in every panty drawer, and women who run the risk of dying every time they have sex.

It’s kind of fun to be treated like a marauding threat to civilization itself.

Via Sadly, No, Michael Medved wrote a rather revealing column. I mean, it’s stupid, but as this quote that Travis plucks out shows, it’s revealing.

Now that we’ve broken barriers with history’s first viable female and African-American candidates, opponents of organized religion hope for a new campaign in which a brave politician makes a credible run for the highest office even while proclaiming his non-belief.

Considering that this entire article is bashing atheists, you can piece together what he’s saying, which is that the country is going to hell now that black people and women can run for President, and now that he’s been deprived of an opportunity to bash either group, he’s going after atheists.

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This book review is interesting—more than any other critique of the 60s counterculture, this one seems to draw the correct conclusions about how the counterculture is sort of irrelevant while the 60s were significant. The world changed a lot in the 60s, but it was the civil rights movement and the Great Society that did it more than the counter-culture. The review sets up and knocks down all the goals of the counterculture: Ending the war? The influence of the counterculture on changing people’s opinions on that is controversial, and it seems that it might have hurt as much as helped. Free love? Its seeds of destruction were in the fact that it was so sexist. (Though the partial birth of feminism from the ashes of the counterculture is nothing to sneer at, but for the sake of this argument, let’s say that feminism was a unique movement.) Tuning in and dropping out? Yeah, that was never going to work. I find myself only halfway convinced by this—let’s just say the counterculture was overrated. The review mentions Thomas Frank’s tedious arguments about consumerism and how it took over the counterculture, but I find myself wholly unconvinced there’s a there there. Consumerism is an ill-defined idea. Is it consumerist if money changes hands? Or if it’s a lot of money? Is it selling out to make any money, or are you morally pure so long as you don’t make enough to live on? Shaming people about enjoying material things or making a decent living strikes me as a cheap substitute for taking on economic injustice—ensuring a living wage for everyone is hard work, and it’s a lot easier to cruise around calling people sell-outs for how they dress, how much money they make, or what electronic gadgets they own.

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Now that the Rev. Wright thing has provided an even better excuse for racists to start saying in public what they usually keep in private, I knew it was just a matter of time before the “blacks should be grateful” argument came out. Being a white person from an especially racist part of the country means you can index some of these nonsense arguments, since you hear white people speak them behind closed doors so often. Not that I’ve actualized any value from being able to predict all the favorite nonsensical tropes that racists trot out, but if I can wrestle one benefit away, it’s this: I can safely say that it’s a lot like the anti-choice nonsense. The assholes making the arguments are irredeemable and should be written off. But it’s still somewhat of a benefit to engage their nonsense and show why it’s nonsense for the benefit of people listening who may be naive and can be rescued before they turn into irredeemable assholes.

I mention this, because I read the most audacious version of “they should be grateful” at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where they link this guy who says:

Far as I am concerned, many Blacks in the US ought to be thankful that no matter how their ancestors got here they are better off in the US than in some shiitehole in Africa, eating scarps of bread, swatting flies and living in mud huts using arrows and clubs to hunt their food.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this, and in a saner world, such a blatant racist should be dismissed. It’s easy to say, “The fuck?” and “You know, Africa is an extremely diverse and complex continent that can’t be characterized so simply.” But if you look beyond the surface of this ignorant fuckwittery, you realize this is another version of “The poor aren’t poor because they have color TVs.”

Grass huts and other racist tropes aside, it’s undeniable that large parts of Africa are desperately poor and war-torn. What I think is useful to remind people, though, is that the poverty and warfare in Africa is not inevitable, because the continent is rich in natural resources that should, in a fair world, leave many nations in Africa quite wealthy with a high standard of living for everyone. That this is not true for a lot of people has everything to do with, you guessed it, the history of Western colonization of the continent. Hell, that’s not even a distant memory—South African apartheid ended within most our memories, and in a sense, it didn’t really end, because the whites that controlled the economy managed to sneak out with their economic interests intact instead of doing what was right and letting the wealth of South Africa be for South Africans. The last scene in There Will Be Blood—you know, with the milkshake?—really tells you the whole story of the West’s attitude towards Africa, an attitude that has been held back some, but not enough. The U.S.’s willingness to instigate warfare and subvert elections when the people elect leaders who will take measures to reclaim the nation’s wealth for the people (socialists!) doesn’t limit itself to Central and South America, you know. We’ve propped up our share of murderous, graft-happy African dictators in the past, with the paper thin justifications of “oh noes, communism!”

Clearly, it’s nonsense to suggest that black individual Americans are sort of faced with this existential choice—here or Africa?—which makes little real world sense, like suggesting that I would somehow individually exist if various ancestors hadn’t migrated from various European countries to mingle their genetic material in the Western Hemisphere. But I bring up the point that the same colonizing forces that brought slavery to the U.S. brought economic destruction to Africa to make the larger point that the word “gratitude” should get nowhere near this discussion.

As someone who’s both into skepticism and feminism, you’d think being a Salem witchcraft crisis buff would have been a part of my life, but actually, I have never read a book on it until I got a copy of In the Devil’s Snare by Mary Beth Norton. I read about the book in Susan Faludi’s new book The Terror Dream, and I was so intrigued by the references to it, I wishlisted it and got a copy from my family for Christmas. As a fan of the theory that delusional social crisises happen because they’re a way to channel other concerns that might be less than politic to raise directly, the theory of this book intrigued me. Norton argues that the Salem crisis was channeling a bunch of negative fears and energies in the community that arose in the framework of the Second Indian War.

To put this kind of theory in context, think about delusional social crisises of our time. The “pro-life” movement is of course an enduring movement built on bullshit-based crisis thinking, and taken in the larger context of social conservatism that’s in a full-blown panic about contraception, gay rights, etc., it becomes clear that the “saving babies” thing is a cover story for anxieties about sexual freedom and women’s liberation. Or for a historical incident that’s similar to a witchcraft crisis—the Satanic day care panics of the 80s. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how these panics fit into a larger backlash against women’s growing presence in the workplace. Day cares were an anxiety-laden symbol of middle class women’s willingness to leave the hearth and enter into the paycheck-drawing workplace, and the panic created a convenient way to rebuke women for abandoning their child-rearing duties. The myth that Mexican immigrants are coming to the U.S. to conquer us by stealth is a racist cover for anxieties about trade and labor issues that drive immigration. Really, name your poison.

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Via Avedon, looks like the LA Times has been pulled into the frog-in-boiling-water effect and is insufficiently alarmed about the possibilities when the government starts looking for inroads to spy on its citizens.

The White House and House Democrats are needlessly fixated on retroactive immunity. The administration, echoed by House Republican leaders, warns darkly that the lack of immunity for past cooperation by telecoms will deter the companies from cooperating in the future; yet both versions (properly) make it clear that companies that comply with lawful orders in the future have nothing to fear. For their part, House Democrats overstate the usefulness of private litigation as a way to pry loose information about the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The Democrats’ opposition to immunity may have made sense as a bluff to induce the administration to provide Congress with documents relating to the program, as it belatedly has begun to do. But the possibility that private lawsuits would expose internal deliberations about the origins of the program was always slight. That sort of disclosure is even less likely after the Supreme Court refused this week to reinstate a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the NSA on behalf of lawyers, journalists and academics who claimed they were harmed by the surveillance program.

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I hoped this was a sly atheist commentary on the season, but I think I see Jesus glowing under there. But it does give me an idea for a nativity scene.

Goddamn, this is tiresome, just this headline:

Why “new atheists” are ignorant about God

That’s like a headline that says, “Why ‘new skeptics’ are ignorant about unicorns.”

It’s an interview with theologian John Haught about how new atheists haven’t earned the right to be atheists or something, because I dunno, they didn’t martyr themselves by swimming in religion before deciding it’s crap. Which, to my mind, is a sign of progress. I shouldn’t have to sink myself neck-deep in nonsense to have the right to call it nonsense. Do I have to study unicorn lore up and down before I get to say unicorns don’t exist?

Your forthcoming book, “God and the New Atheism,” is a critique of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. You claim that they are pale imitations of great atheists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What are they missing?

The only thing new in the so-called new atheism is the sense that we should not tolerate faith because, by doing so, we open people’s minds to any crazy idea — including dangerous ideas like those that led to 9/11. In every other respect, this atheism is similar to the secular humanism of the modern period, which said that faith is incompatible with science, that religion and belief in God are bad for morality, and that theology should be purged from culture and academic life. These are not new ideas. But there were atheists in the past who were much more theologically educated than these. My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what’s going on in the world of theology. They talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they’re the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity — the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion.

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Neil linked an article that’s making the rounds again about the way the Allies effectively broke down Nazi resistance to testifying after WWII through kindness and playing games of wit with them. It’s very interesting and more evidence against the use of routine torture to “get information”, which is the official excuse for torturing from the Bush administration and all their defenders. It helps to watch lots of “24″ to convince yourself that there’s just oodles of people out there who are one electroshock to the genitals away from spilling all sorts of life-saving information. The article is good—all a refutation of the idea that torture is an effective way of obtaining information.

I have a concern, though, and the thread below the post devolves into a discussion about whether or not torture is an effective interrogation technique, which indicates that a lot of well-meaning people are getting sucked into the discussion of “how to interrogate for information”, when the entire discussion is a red herring. The assumption behind a lot of the “torture doesn’t work” discourse is the idea that those who made torture a policy are perhaps well-meaning (want information) but misguided. Which then devolves into a whole discussion about when torture is useful for the goal of getting information or not, and people lose sight of the fact that “information” is an excuse used to conceal the real reason for torture.

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Update: I’m sure I’ve linked this song before, but it’s always fun to do it again. Devo’s cover of “Ohio”. It has an unexpected power to it, unexpected until you remember that members of the band were at Kent State when the shooting happened. Apparently, the shooting was the turning point for the concept of “devolution”. I have more information and more on the concept at my MP3 blog.

I woke up this morning with the song “Ohio” in my head, probably thinking about how I was telling a friend to check out Devo’s cover of it last week and then Gorch Fock’s cover popped up on my random ten. I like that song in all incarnations, and I think it transcends the particulars of its history. That said, and not to minimize the tragedy of what happened at Kent State, this line sets my teeth on edge just a little.

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’.
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin’.
Four dead in Ohio.

Highlighted. It’s a great line in the emotional sense. It really captures the sense of betrayal felt in the wake of the shootings. But from a logical standpoint,* it makes no sense. The sense that this was the final event that broke the anti-war movement out of the dance with the powers-that-be turned out not to be true, and how could it be? There was, in the end, no other way to try to end the war than exerting pressure on the government.

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1. In August 1960, Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards to determine if the Office of Security had assets that may assist him in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action. The mission target was Fidel Castro…

4. Mr. [Robert A.] Maheu advised that he had met one Johnny Roselli on several occasions while visiting Las Vegas. He only knew him casually through clients, but was given to understand that he was a high-ranking member of the “syndicate” and controlled all of the ice-making machines on the Strip. Maheu reasoned that, if Roselli was in fact a member of the clan, he undoubtedly had connections leading into the Cuban gambling interests…

7. During the week of 25 September, Maheu was introduced to Sam [”Gold”] who was staying at the Fontainebleu Hotel, Miami Beach. It was several weeks after his meeting with Sam and Joe, who was identified to him as a courier operating between Havana and Miami, that he saw photographs of both of these individuals in the Sunday supplemental “Parade.” They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficant, respectively. Both were on the list of the Attorney General’s ten most-wanted men. The former was described as the Chicago chieftain of the Cosa Nostra and successor to Al Capone, and the latter, the Cosa Nostra boss of Cuban operations…

8. In discussing the possible methods of accomplishing this mission, Sam suggested that they not resort to firearms but, if he could be furnished some type of potent pill, that could be placed in Castro’s food or drink, it would be a much more effective operation…

[After two or three people get cold feet and back out, the operation is cancelled after the Bay of Pigs, however…]

At the height of the project negotiations, Sam expressed concern about his girlfriend, Phyllis McGuire, who he learned was getting much attention from Dan Rowan while both were booked at a Las Vegas night club. Sam asked Maheu to put a bug in Rowan’s room to determine the extent of his intimacy with Miss McGuire. The technician involved in the assignment was discovered in the process, arrested, and taken to the Sheriff’s office for questioning. He called Maheu and informed him that he had been detained by the police. This call was made in the presence of the Sheriff’s personnel.

Subsequently, the Department of Justice announced its intention to prosecute Maheu along with the technician. On 7 February 1962, the Director of Security briefed the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, on the circumstances leading up to Maheu’s involvement in the wiretap. At our request, prosecution was dropped…

17. On 2 December 1968, Roselli, along with four other individuals, was convicted of conspiracy to cheat members of the Friars Club of $400,000 in a rigged gin rummy game…

19. …Maheu…received a call from Thomas Waddin, Roselli’s lawyer, who stated that all avenues of appeal had been exhausted, and his client now faces deportation. Waddin indicated that, if someone did not intercede on Roselli’s behalf, he would make a complete expose of his activities with the Agency.

Which he did, but it’s great to see the CIA’s official version. This stuff is gold.

Joss Whedon wrote an amazing rant over at Whedonesque after seeing the brutal stoning to death of seventeen-year-old Dua Khalil in Iraq. I can’t do it justice without quoting the entire thing, but I’ll give you a little and just ask you to read it.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film[”Captivity”], which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fieldsâ€? Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorryâ€?.

“I’m sorry.�

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

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PZ emailed me this amusing back-and-forth between people debating about the meanie atheists with their militant insistence on speaking their minds, and whether or not that hurts the “cause”. For some reason, the suffragists get dragged into this. Actually, it starts with Larry Moran, who has a good, solid understanding that the suffragists were ass-kicking feminist activists.

Here’s just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women’s right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.

He’s countered by J.J. Ramsey, who assumes they must have won the vote after nearly a century of agitation by asking nicely.

Were the women saying that men were stupid? Were they portraying them as rubes and simpletons? Were they falling into the trap of making themselves resemble the negative stereotypes of women at the time? IIRC, the answers are No, No, and No. Substitute “atheists� for “women� and “theists� for “men,� and the answers are emphatically Yes, Yes, and Yes. It is one thing to be assertive. It is another thing to be gratuitously rude.

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I banked this post at 3QuarksDaily under the theory I would write about it later, but now is as good a time as any. It’s a link to a story in The Harvard Gazette about the Modern Girl Project, a historical project done at the University of Washington, Seattle that tracks the way the Modern Girl of the 1920s was a worldwide phenomenon.

The image of the 1920s flapper endures to this day: the frank gaze, the kiss curls and cropped hair, the slender figure, the painted eyebrows and bright red lips. In that era, the “It Girl” was It.

But the American It Girl was also the German neue Frauen, the Japanese moga, the Indian vamp, the Chinese modeng xiaojie, and the French garçonnes.

Iterations of the flapper around the world had in common an explicit eroticism and an uncommon power to challenge social conventions. In the interval between the world wars, her iconic image — with regional adjustments — appeared not just in the United States but in all five continents.

Fascinating to me because it’s a refutation of some underlying myths about feminism, the number one being that it’s a recent American affectation that has only just now started to spread internationally. I’ve been guilty of implying that myth myself. The more complicated truth is that feminism is a long-standing international movement with a fascinating history that moves in fits and starts, and is related to other progressive movements. Progress is made, the backlash begins, things go to hell and hopefully when the dust clears, things have gotten better and it’s time to restart the cycle. Flappers were something of a flash in the feminist pan, and by no means were they uncontroversial.

When American women won the right to vote in 1919, the logical question was, What next? Suffragists had the answer ready: full enjoyment of civil and domestic life for women, equal to that of men.

But suffragists found out that what was next was not much. It would be decades before American women gained anything like gender equality in the home, in the workplace, and in higher education.

And they faced another unsettling fact: Flappers were next. To the dismay of early feminists, these unruly daughters of feminism were driven by an apolitical appetite for clothes, boys, and the outward signs of freedom.

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Jill writes about how anti-choice groups are trying to improve their reputation in black communities, and how this is unlikely to work due to the fact that most anti-choice groups are dominated by racist crackers. As Jill details, these efforts tend to be crippled at the outset by the anti-choice assumption that black women are stupid. Also, anti-choicer are the brains behind the efforts to imprison women for “child abuse” for using drugs during their pregnancies, the enforcement of which almost exclusively targets black women, especially in the South, and are functionally white supremacist and send the signal to black women that their attempts to give birth in peace will be met with resistance from a white-dominated state.

But anti-choicers think they have their weapon—they can selectively misquote Margaret Sanger to make it seem that she was trying to wipe out black people! Never mind that the quotes they claim are anti-black are actually the opposite and they only appear racist through the use of ellipses. The lie has legs because Sanger did associate with eugenicists, though she was never part of the race-baiting eugenics movement.

Anyway, I bring this up, because the anti-choicers who scream that abortion is racist genocide, and who “prove” it by referring to Margaret Sanger leave out one important detail, a detail that I didn’t realize until I read When Abortion Was A Crime. (The book club discussion of the book is at that link—good stuff there!) During the period of Planned Parenthood’s history where Sanger was associating with eugenicists, the organization was adamantly anti-abortion. Women would come to Planned Parenthood seeking abortion and be sent off with information to prevent the next pregnancy and some words of pity that this time it was too late.

In other words, when anti-choicers point to Sanger’s association with eugenics, and trying to imply that people “like her” were eugenicists, they are saying that people who oppose abortion rights are eugenicists.

Planned Parenthood’s historical opposition to abortion rights (which was only overturned after feminist activists made it clear how important abortion rights are) does seem to have been some kind of marketing strategy. They deemed what they did “birth control”, because that tends to be a more user-friendly term than “contraception”, but the latter is really what they meant. However, they soon found out that when most people heard “birth control”, they tended to think about the kind of birth control they were most familiar with, which was early term abortions, which were regarded mostly as restoring menstruation. A good deal of Leslie Reagan’s research about how people regarded abortion came from letters to Planned Parenthood requesting abortions, requests that were always turned down. Planned Parenthood realized they wouldn’t get very far promoting contraception if their entire customer base just wanted abortion, so they had to adamantly come out against abortion so people would then ask, “So what is it then that you do?”

But that’s just conjecture. The fact of the matter is that when anti-choicers condemn Planned Parenthood under Margaret Sanger, they are condemning an organization that opposed abortion rights, period.

All this just goes to show that anti-choicers aren’t against just abortion and this has litte to nothing to do with “killing babies”, and everything to do with strong opposition to women exacting any control whatsoever over their reproductive lives. The anti-choice hatred of Planned Parenthood doesn’t really make sense until you realize they oppose any kind of birth control, and especially any kind that focuses on female control of it. Most Planned Parenthoods don’t perform abortions, but that doesn’t stop anti-choicers from hating it, because it isn’t really about abortion. Planned Parenthood is a symbol of female control over our own bodies, and a symbol of the pro-choice belief that all women deserve that control, even if they aren’t wealth enough to obtain it privately.

This is so cool, from Hullabaloo. It’s a previously undiscovered portrait of the officially most divisive President in history, from when he was a much younger man. I dig this picture a lot. Read up on it here.

I suppose I should have some deep, relevant things to say about Saddam Hussein’s execution, but other bloggers have said everything that needs to be said. So I thought it was time to do a little flashback post of only minor relevance. Mostly, this shit is awesome.

From Jake, I found this FBI memo from 1947 that explains why It’s A Wonderful Life is communist propaganda. From the memo:

With regard to the picture “It’s a Wonderful Life”, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a “scrooge-type” so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.

In addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. [redacted] related that if he made this picture portraying the banker, he would have shown this individual to have been following the rules as laid down by the State Bank Examiner in connection with making loans. Further, [redacted] stated that the scene wouldn’t have “suffered at all” in portraying the banker as a man who was protecting funds put in his care by private individuals and adhering to the rules governing the loan of that money rather than portraying the part as it was shown. In summary, [redacted] stated that it was not necessary to make the banker such a mean character and “I would never have done it that way.”

Will Chen quotes John Noakes, who has this to say that is accurate enough.

“What’s interesting in the FBI critique is that the Baileys were also bankers,” said Noakes. ” and what is really going on is a struggle between the big-city banker (Potter) and the small banker (the Baileys). Capra was clearly on side of small capitalism and the FBI was on the side of big capitalism.

The FBI misinterpreted this classic struggle as communist propaganda. I would argue that ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is a poignant movie about the transition in the U.S. between small and big capitalism, with Jimmy Stewart personifying the last hope for a small town. It’s a lot like the battle between Home Depot and the mom and pop hardware store.”

Which goes to show where their priorities lay. The threat of communism isn’t distinguished at all from the threat of small, local businesses. Basically, if you aren’t in the upper classes, by the FBI’s measure, you were The Enemy.

What I find particularly interesting is that the right wing in America, who is clearly at its heart about estabishing an aristocracy more than anything, came around to realizing that it’s better to embrace the symbolism that working class America uses to romanticize itself, symbolism that’s rampant in It’s A Wonderful Life. Wal-Mart is clearly the most odious example, with right wing pundits embracing the ginormous company owned by some of the richest people in the world as if it were a symbol of homespun, church-going, humble, middle American values. If It’s A Wonderful Life were remade to wingnut specifications, George Bailey would be the beleagured wealthy banker, standing up for middle America against the wolves at the door who want to ruin him by keeping businesses local and money in their own communities. Not sure how it would work, though, without being a big, hard-to-understand mess. Which is why right wing attempts to recast big corporations as the true representatives of middle America are best left vague, with most energy going into villianizing liberals for drinking expensive coffee products.

And while I started off this post saying that I had nothing to say about Saddam Hussein. But after wading through a pile of wingnut come splashed all over Blogistan after he was hanged, I read Josh Marshall’s excellent post on it.

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn’t come close to cutting it — the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the ’secular arm’. Try pretending it’s a war crimes trial but it’s just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they’re up to now.

That’s it in a nutshell. Saddam’s trial and Wal-Mart pretending to be homespun—what they have in common is that it’s almost disturbingly half-assed the way the American aristocracy tries to dress-up their interests as those of middle America. That anyone even buys into that makes me sick. Bush is acting like a medieval king executing another, while the Iraqis are living through a hellish version of new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss. And anyone who is not currently a member of the American aristocracy who is cheering this execution on, as if it meant a damn thing to them, is a fucking fool. Bush’s little family dramas played out on the world stage are not our problem—our problem are all the people he’s killing in order to get his way.

From Hilzoy, I found that Glenn Reynolds is seeking new and exciting levels of delusion that were before only dreamt of by man. Reynolds is writing about Orson Scott Card’s new novel on a possible American civil war, which has come out rather convienently timed to distract people from the very real civil war in Iraq. No matter, because Reynolds writes what may be an award-winningly stupid sentence in this article.

I’ve noted before that one of the great American accomplishments was to get over the Civil War without the kind of lingering bitterness that often marks — and reignites — such conflicts elsewhere. And we can, perhaps, thank the ongoing Civil War reminiscence industry for helping to keep the horrors of that war alive in people’s memories. Throughout the remainder of the 19th Century, many people feared a reignition of the Civil War, but it didn’t happen.

I particularly like how he singles out the re-enactors as some sort of cause for war not breaking back out, rather than what it is, which is a symptom of some very lasting resentments over the Civil War that Reynolds, who hails from the former Confederate state of Tennessee, is definitely aware of, even as he pretends otherwise. As much as I hate to say it, because I’m a big fan of Marshall Plan-style generosity towards conquered enemies, the best theory as to why the former Confederate states were unwilling to try that stunt again was that the North beat their asses so thoroughly that they never were able to recover. That said, they deserved it(UPDATE: To clarify, I meant that they deserved the thorough economic ruin delivered, which is what you have coming to you when you build your economy on slavery.), though it’s a shame that more than 140 years later, the South is still behind the rest of the country economically. Interestingly, the link that Reynolds provides is some maudlin shit about how Southerners know the pain of being occupied, whine, self-pity, and bullshit. While not excusing the war atrocities dealt to the South by General Sherman and company, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Reynolds is engaging in some disingenous bravado. The Reconstruction was not an “occupation”, and saying so is a slap in the face to people who have had to suffer under real occupations, like the French under Nazi rule or the Iraqis under us. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was also not slavery, which is the travesty that started this whole thing in the first place.

Reynolds trots out out the Union-soliders-stole-our-china story that is commonplace in the South, but I find it interesting that he doesn’t mention the other big, fat grudge that has vexed people who are nostalgic for the Confederacy ever since, which is the “Oh my god, and they elected NEGROES to office” story. And don’t tell me that one isn’t considered just as bad by the Confederate flag-waving nuts of the South, even if they may be less public about it any more. In Reynolds’ own state of Tennessee, a little race-baiting went a long way to get Harold Ford defeated. But that’s just an indicator of the highly selective view that he’s using of the South’s behavior since the Civil War to uphold his pet theory that white Southerners aren’t holding a grudge. He’s clearly nuts. I know people my own age who were taught in school that it was the “War of Northern Aggression”, which is a good indicator of the levels of denial that go on in the South so that people can continue to nurse their pointless grudge over that war. You would think that the fact that the South was wrong every step of the way up to war would mediate people’s grude-holding just a little bit, but nope. The “Southern Strategy” still works (though less than it used to), and people are still hiding behind the phrase “states’ rights” to excuse individual oppression.

Not that I expect anything resembling intellectual honesty from Reynolds, but this bit of blatant bullshit may be a new low.

First, I must post the screeching headline exactly as it appears on WingNutDaily this AM:

Delicious. When it was rebroadcast, CNN edited out the reference to Mehlman. Here is the unedited YouTube clip.

Appearing on CNN’s Larry King Live, Maher said it’s an open secret in Washington that RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman is a homosexual and that he has “never denied” it.

Maher added that he plans to out at least three other closeted Republican officials – including “chiefs of staff” – on his HBO political show Friday night to show their hypocrisy in supporting traditional family values. He is host of “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

King asked Maher if the charges have appeared “in print,” and Maher responded affirmatively.

Rumors of Mehlman’s sexual orientation first appeared last year in GQ magazine. The RNC denied the charge. “Ken Mehlman is not gay,” said then-RNC official Steve Schmidt. However, when asked directly by “gay” publications, Mehlman has dodged the question.

Maher needs to get Mike Rogers (who’s been all over this story for years) on his show to talk about this.

Poster by Austin ClineFlea demonstrates once again why she’s just the best in this post she wrote about the infamous Leni Riefenstahl. Flea’s post is mostly about the larger question of the sick possibility that the most naturally talented filmmaker of all time might have been the woman who put her talents to the task of creating propaganda for the Nazis, and it’s a hell of an interesting read, so read it. This post can wait. Go, now. I’ve got more to add when you’re done with it.

Okay, done? Good. It’s fortunate that Flea wrote that a few days ago because it actually dovetails nice with David’s new post up at Orcinus about the relationship of fascism and misogyny. It’s interesting, really, that Riefenstahl had such a prominent position with the Nazis, seeing as how Nazis were what you might call keen on strict gender roles.

Hitler made an explicit link between “liberal” feminist and suffrage movements — which even then were working to undermine the traditional disempowerment of women — and Jews shortly after obtaining the chancellorhood in 1933. The next year he denounced the so-called New Woman as the “invention of Jewish intellectuals.” He also urged German women to reject as unnatural the “overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes” as embodied in “Jewish intellectualism.”

Of course, I’m being a bit cheeky. Misogynists who run around bellyaching about the importance of “traditional” gender roles and how women’s place is in service of men always make exceptions when it suits them; look at Caitlin Flanagan and pretty much every other woman out there making a nice living telling other women they need to go back to the kitchen. Anyway, reading David’s post, it became clear to me why Riefenstahl’s artistic vision dovetailed so neatly with the aims of fascism. From David’s post:

Indeed, this is about how Hitler himself spoke regarding women:

Man’s universe is vast compared to that of a woman. Man is taken up with his ideas, his preoccupations. It’s only incidental if he devotes his thoughts to a woman. Woman’s universe, on the other hand, is man. She sees nothing else, so to speak, and that is why she’s capable of loving so deeply.

— Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, pp. 344-345.

In his 1989 book Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values — and Our Own, Norwegian scholar Harald Ofstad sums it up:

The Nazi view of sex roles is based on conventional notions taken to extremes. Sexuality has no intrinsic value; it is only a means of unleashing the power of men and the strength of the nation. Women are instruments.

A real man can never have any deep emotional contact with a woman. Her world is totally at odds with his. Real men can only have meaningful contact with other men, e.g., in such organizations as the SS. There they share the bonds of companionship and loyalty to their leader.

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“When Anthony Met Stanton” by A.E. Ted Aub

The NY Times probably only throws people who still have their wits about them a bone once in awhile to make us compliant, sort of like the good cop/bad cop routine, but no matter—I’m tickled beyond belief that not only did they run a refutation to anti-choice claims that they’re the true heirs of the suffragists (as opposed, of course, to modern feminists), but that the refutation is so scathing. And by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff, no less.

The impetus for the op-ed is the travesty that is Feminists For Life buying Susan B. Anthony’s house in order to bolster their credibility as a “feminist” organization, though they quite clearly aren’t. But the line that FFL is selling is one you’ll see popping up from all sorts of anti-feminist women, that they’re the “real” feminists because they could swear that the suffragists of old were anti-abortion. That argument is ahistorical, of course—for one thing, 19th century feminists were certainly not all of the same mind on these issues. Second of all, Anthony and especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton weren’t exactly members of the subset of feminists that saw it mostly as a way to control male misbehavior and sexuality, who were arguing that women deserved the vote to improve their performance as mothers. As Schiff notes, Anthony was distinctly disapproving of baby-making as a past time, at least in some regards.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s pregnancies were Anthony’s despair: how was it possible, she wailed, “that for a moment’s pleasure to herself or her husband, she should thus increase the load of cares under which she already groans�? She was equally indulgent toward Antoinette Brown Blackwell, one of the movement’s most gifted orators: “Now, Nette, not another baby, is my peremptory command.� Over and over she needled Stanton, galled that the suffragette dream team had “all given yourselves over to baby making and left poor brainless me to do battle alone.� Stanton was the mother of six — one of whom weighed more than 12 pounds at delivery — when she received those cheering words.

Anthony was a spinster, of course. But her own personal annoyance at her friends’ child-bearing ways aside, there’s no reason to think that anti-abortion in those days is the same thing as it is now. As Schiff points out, abortion was dangerous and dirty back then and contraception scarce, so as it was used, it tended to be under male control for male ends—women suffered from painful, often fatal abortions at the behest of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants, even if it meant misery and possible death for the women they were fucking. From a 19th century feminist point of view, which Anthony hints at above, it seemed like the solution was men to learn to control themselves better. Now that we have safe abortion, effective contraception, and women’s right to say no is respected a lot more. In Anthony’s time, the reason to believe that women who got abortions were often acting against their own wishes was that it was dangerous and women often didn’t have the power to really rebel. Now women do have that power and it’s not dangerous and FFL still thinks women can’t be acting of their own moral agency, because they think women are mental children. Anthony certainly didn’t think that. Oppressed and stupid are just different things.

But the best part of this op-ed is that Schiff blows away the FFL assertion that they have definitive proof that Anthony was anti-choice because of some quotes of hers they wield a lot.

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Wow. I’ve never heard of this gay purge history, but Lorraine Ahern of the Greensboro News-Record has a fascinating article up on a series of trials held in 1957 in Greensboro, NC that charged 32 men with “crimes against nature.”

In the end, 24 were convicted and received sentences of 5 to 20 years; some ended up serving on highway chain gangs.

The now-obscure episode, which some longtime residents came to call “the purge,” was the largest attempted roundup of homosexuals in Greensboro history and marked one of the most intense gay scares of the 1950s.

…Unlike sweeps of subsequent decades, involving raids on public parks and gay bars, Greensboro’s 1957 trials focused on private acts behind closed doors. The purpose, in the words of the police chief, was to “remove these individuals from society who would prey upon our youth,” and to protect the town from what a presiding judge called “a menace.”

A list was gathered of suspected homos based on interrogations of “suspects”, and ,no surprise, socially or politically prominent men on that list were protected. This long article is really worth a read, because it’s a snapshot in time of what it was like to be closeted in a small town during the dark days of the homophobic 1950s (of course this is the golden age of America that the bible beaters dream of returning to). This story could be from almost any city in the country at the time:

In one series of letters that police seized as evidence, a UNC-Chapel Hill student from High Point wrote to a male classmate in code. “Hilda Sara” stood for “homosexual.” He closed his letters with “B.B.B.” — “better be butch” — and assigned male friends female nicknames such as “Thelma” or “Mamie,” a nod to America’s first lady in the Eisenhower years.

As campy and facetious as the letters sound today, an anthropologist who years later taught North Carolina’s first state-approved course on gender and homosexuality notes that there was reason for such intrigue.

In larger cities, beginning with Washington, the FBI had recruited local vice squads to conduct surveillance on suspected gays and enlisted postmasters to monitor mail for telltale material such as men’s “physique magazines.”

Even in private conversation, people were discreet.

“If someone heard a man say, ‘I went on a date with Betsy,’ that wouldn’t raise any suspicion,” observed retired UNCG professor Thomas Fitzgerald. “People had to camouflage their lives. The ’50s were abysmal.”

***

Times have changed in NC: Durham and Orange counties (as well as the city of Durham and towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro) have provided domestic partner benefits for some time; Greensboro is about to move on it.

A grainy image I took with an old Palmpix camera at night while on a boat ride on July 11, 2001.

Two months later, we all know what happened.

I was at work, and stayed the whole day, though in a daze. I have many relatives in NYC and was worried sick about them (some were among those who walked across the bridge that day, covered in the white ashen debris). I couldn’t get through because all circuits were busy.

Actually, my first thought, in the panic and shock, was to call my mom. I picked up the phone and began to dial an old number in Brooklyn.

My mother died in 1997.

I wanted to know she was OK, what she thought about what happened, etc. I put the phone down and began to cry, then tried calling my brother in Delaware. After several attempts I finally got through. I do remember talking to him and he had felt the same impulse to talk to Mom when he learned about the news.

This is where your brain can go when it feels like the world is in chaos. I’m sure plenty of you have similar tales of disconnect.
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I’ve discovered a delightful new blog by a one Phileas A. Fogg, a member of the venerable League of Premature Anti-Fascists. Fogg has decided to grace us with his blogging presence many years after his death at the end of WWII, when the League watched as their worst fears came to pass. He was apparently inspired to do this by Keith Olbermann’s recent hat tip to anti-fascism. But it’s today’s post that made me realize that we should be glad to have this hero from the past here to help us revive the League of Premature Anti-Fascists. He tells the story today of a man named Cecil Spring Rice who dishonored Imperial Britain by not doing his damn job and the results of that.

Cecil grew angrier and angrier at his inability to convince the United States of the righteousness of the struggle. And then, I’m afraid, he snapped. He began to see German spies under every inkwell, accusing the Kaiser of poisoning his tea via the “German-looking� maid* who cleaned his office. He began to get possessive as well, claiming that all British visitors to Washington, D.C. must register with the embassy as well as pay a landing fee, usually in the form of a shiny marble or, alternately, a lark’s feather painted silver.

He contrasts this story with our modern times, and we come out looking the worst. Read, as they say, the whole thing.