Lenny Bruce got Lyndon Johnson totally wrong (but maybe it wasn’t his fault)

Let’s go back to the early 1960s. Here’s legendary comedian Lenny Bruce making fun of the racial politics/style of Lyndon Johnson, the President who would sign

  • the Civil Rights Act of 1964
  • the Voting Rights Act of 1965
  • the Fair Housing Act of 1968
  • the Immigration Act of 1965, which ended racial quotas
  • and Medicare and Medicaid, which ended Jim Crow admission policies in thousands of American hospitals.

In fairness to Lenny, who knew? US Senator Lyndon Johnson had been a pig in the late 1940s and 1950s when it came to civil rights. The best that could be said for him up to then was that he did not back Strom Thurmond’s segregationist Presidential campaign in 1948. All the good, smart people looked at Lyndon Johnson take the White House in November of 1963 and said “What an asshole; we’re doomed.”

But once installed, Johnson, a politician first and foremost, knew what time it was and what he would be remembered for.

Any lessons for the present? #joebidensucks #anybodybutbiden

Share this ➡️
Posted in history, politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

On electoral politics, compromise, and life

“People are strange,” The Doors famously declared half a century ago, but they are differently so depending on the circumstances. These days I find strange the attitude that some of us take towards compromise in electoral politics. Everybody knows that life is full of compromises, many very difficult. From the outset, we don’t pick the circumstances of our birth, which can be very hard. Then we have to deal with parents not of our choosing, not to mention siblings, relatives, schoolmates, teachers, and health care providers. And even when we make choices – our spouses, our friends, our educational paths, our careers – we inevitably face challenges that require us to make more adjustments. Yet when it comes to politics, we imagine that none of this reality should apply.

Continue reading
Share this ➡️
Posted in politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

In which Drew Pearson tells Chairman Khrushchev that Americans are a “peculiar people”

I am finally getting around to the latest Kennedy Assassination files posted on the National Archives. These include a 1964 Central Intelligence Agency document in which some CIA informer summarized a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Drew Pearson and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. According to this informant, Khrushchev allegedly asked “What really happened?” to which “Mr. Pearson said . . . ”

“ . . . in effect that the whole affair had taken place just as had been reported in the newspapers and presumably by the Soviet Ambassador in Washington. Chairman Khrushchev was utterly incredulous and his attitude was summarized by Mrs. Pearson as being archetypical ‘of every European I have ever talked to about this subject’. That is, that there was some kind of conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy and then murder the assassin with the Dallas Police Department as an accessory.”

Drew Pearson was a famous syndicated columnist of the 1950s and 1960s. The memo claims that he and Khrushchev had a bit of a tussle at one point: Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in big brother, jfk | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The White Left in the thinking of Edward Bellamy and the imagination of Carson McCullers

I am reading various novels and thinking about the White Left in them. By “White Left” I mean the left that does not want to consider the centrality of race in United States politics. I mean the left that says that it is really all about class, the corporation, the banks, and such, and does not want to grapple with white supremacy. Edward Bellamy joins the White Left in his 1887 utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887. Carson McCullers briefly illuminates the White Left in her 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Looking_BackwardIn Looking Backward, Bellamy tells the story of an upper-middle class man named Julian West who falls asleep in his home in Boston in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. Upon his miraculous arousal, he discovers that the United States has been cured of all troubles stemming from class conflict, inequality, and greed. Everyone now works for the Great Trust and the Industrial  Army. People retire at 45. Obviously, it is much better in this future, the protagonist explains; he uses the following metaphor to illustrate what it was like Back Then: Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in race | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Edward Bellamy’s post-corporate utopia

Looking_BackwardWe are approaching the 130th anniversary of the publication of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy had all kinds of bad things to say about capitalism in the book, first released in January 1888. His upper, upper-middle class protagonist Julian West goes to sleep in the year 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find his native Boston and the rest of the world evolved into a wonderfully cooperative paradise. The novel explains of how this happy result came to pass. Then, to his dismay (spoiler alert), at the end of the pedagogical saga West has a nightmare that he has returned to Gilded Age Beantown. All that poverty and misery comes back again, right under his nose.

In shock, West staggers up to his old local highbrow club and gives the Boston Brahmin set a piece of his mind. “Where have you been lately,” one of the clubbies asks, presumably armed with brandy and cigar. “I have been in Golgotha,” West solemnly declares. “I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross!  . . .  Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death!” This declaration does not go down well with his colleagues, who ominously move on him until he wakes up again, back in his ideal future, complete with a new fiancee who he has successfully courted in about a week. Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in big brother | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Socialist Workers Party infiltration statistics, revisited

I am finally getting around to reading FBI on Trial: The victory in the Socialist Workers Party suit against government spying. The statistics on Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltration of the group are just amazing, even to jaundiced old me.

Socialist Workers Party buttonIn 1966, ten percent of all SWP members were government informers. Five percent of all Young Socialist Alliance members (the SWP’s youth group) were snitches, too (70).

From 1967 through 1976, as many as nine percent of the group’s members informed; at minimum, two percent regularly told the FBI what was going on at the SWP (70).

From 1943 to the early 1950s, the government wiretapped the group for approximately 20,000 wiretap days. It microphone-bugged the group for around 12,000 “bug days” (88).

Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in big brother | Tagged | Leave a comment

The remarkable endurance of San Francisco’s creepy “Early Days” statue

Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle has a good history of a statue that should be sitting in some municipal storage basement, rather than perched in front of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. “Early Days,” as it is called, is part of a grand “Pioneer Monument” celebrating various new world explorers, Gold Rush dudes, and even several Greco-Roman goddesses. Yesterday I visited the damned thing, and took some photos for your viewing pleasure. Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in history | Tagged , | Leave a comment

White House: are you washed in the blood of the pig?

Largely eclipsed by the Charlottesville Horror are comments that President Trump made the other day that included a historical lesson on how to deal with Muslim terrorists. The advisory came in the course of a statement denouncing the recent ISIS attacks in Barcelona. Mr. Trump made mention of a tactic that United States General John Pershing supposedly deployed in his capacity of governor of a Philippines province, following the US’s crushing of The Philippines insurrection, circa 1902.

The Washington Post has an account of Trump’s claims: Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in history | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The High Tech Men Make The High Tech World

Mr Demore has lost his job at Google because he said:

Men are interested in things. Women are interested in people. Men are much better at creating and selling things than women. This is why 80% of high tech jobs are held by men. Because these differences are rooted in biology, attempts to correct this imbalance with diversity programs are ill-advised, wasteful, and doomed to failure.

Let’s think about these ideas in their social context, the high tech world that the high tech men have made. Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in gender differences, Silicon Valley | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How Google joined the Nth International

Kudos to David Brooks of The New York Times, whose strange column calling for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to resign forced me to read former Google engineer James Damore’s equally strange advisory on gender differences in the high tech workplace.

“Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things,” Damore writes. This led to his dismissal, which led to Brooks’ outrage. The op-ed columnist insists that Damore’s observations on gender differences have been backed up by “several scientists.” Ironically one of these “scientists,” Playboy columnist Deborah Soh, shows a great deal of interest in things herself. I invite you to read Dr. Soh’s reviews of the new “teledildonic” Fleshlight Launch, the Guybrator, and the Fun Factory Booty Set. These all fall under the Things Category, I presume, although I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to verify that claim. Continue reading

Share this ➡️
Posted in gender differences, Silicon Valley | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment