On Robert Caro

On May 1 the fourth volume of Robert Caro's massive and enthralling biography of Lyndon Johnson is scheduled to be released. This was to be the last volume, but as many of us suspected, there was simply no way the prolix Caro was going to cover LBJ's entire Vice Presidency, Presidency, and the few remaining years of his life in one volume given the depth of scope he devoted to LBJ's pre-presidential career. Recently Esquire and The New York Times Magazine both devoted extensive features to Caro and his work (which perhaps inevitably led to some significant overlap in both themes but also in anecdotes).

I would suspect that most writers will respond as I did, with considerable awe about his process and his painstaking dedication to getting it all just right. But I suspect there will also be considerable envy (and admiration) for the way that he has been able to impose his will on a major publishing house even in an era where the bounded book seems besieged from all sides.

I'll be lined up on May 1 to pick up the latest volume. I would also push anyone interested in big (but perhaps not quite so ambitious) biographies of LBJ to consider Randall Woods' substantial one-volume biography of Johnson. One of the more interesting, and perhaps controversial, subplots in Woods' creation is that he refused to engage with Caro's work, something he explains in the introduction of a book that casts LBJ in a far more positive light than Caro does, especially in his first two volumes.

Linktastic Voyage

Loads of stories that have caught my eye have begun to pile up on my tabs. My intent was to give each a full post, but with my pace of late, let's face it -- that wasn't gonna happen. So here are some links with commentary as apt:

You know what? President Obama has accomplished a hell of a lot, especially given the political context within which he has had to operate.

The Miller Center at UVA has started a blog, Riding The Tiger, that promises to look at the presidential election in historical context.

Cliopatria, the first among equals of the History News Network Blogs is closing its doors. Ralph Luker, paterfamilias of Cliopatria, did yeoman's work herding cats over there for more than 8 years. When he started blogging at HNN Ralph was one of a precious few professional historians who saw the potential for blogging as a medium of blending historical, political, social and cultural questions. In large part due to his nurturing thousands of historians now blog.

Ruy Teixeira thinks much of the hullaballoo about Independent voters is nonsense and he recently found himself reviewing an especially nonsensical book about Independent voters. Negative reviews are fun.

This about sums up my feelings.

Voter ID laws, created to create a solution to a problem that doesn't exist (but really simply created to make it harder for Democrats to vote), might just end up having unintended consequences.

Students in one history class at my alma mater are making campaign ads rather than writing final papers. I love this idea:

There’s a catch, though. The students can only use images, quotes, documents, and music from the era. They cannot use anything that came afterwards. An image of the White House burning in 1812 would not work for the election of 1808. They cannot use images of Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware, a product more reflective of the 1840s than the 1770s. Their assignment is to capture the spirit of the age – not the spirit of our historical memory.

I might have to appropriate this idea and adjust it for my students.

At the Chronicle Leonard Cassuto argues that the comprehensive exam needs to be changes because it does not seamlessly fuel the way toward writing a dissertation. The problem with this solution is that it assumes rather than proves the seamlessness. The fact is that the comprehensive exams are rather different from the dissertation -- and frankly I've always argued that in many ways the comprehensive exams are what separates history PhD's from laymen -- learning to respect both the history and the historiography is vital. There is a lot of material out there. I am of the belief that before one does original work one should immerse oneself in the books and articles that have come before. And in so doing get to really know the history as well.

In which I say some stuff about the new UT system post-tenure review policy.

9/11 Ten Years On

I was sleeping in my apartment in Falls Church, Virginia when I was awoken by a phone call. It was my ex-girlfriend who had moved out recently enough that the scars were still fresh. A phone call like that is rarely a good sign.

Had I been looking out the window just minutes earlier I might have been able to see the plane heading on its death trajectory toward the Pentagon. I spent the day out at the ex girlfriend's apartment further out on I-66 from my relatively inner suburb. The highway was quiet though there was a lot of talk about whether or not more attacks were to come, talk that would continue for days and weeks and months and years.

It is too easy to say that 9/11 changed everything but it surely changed a lot. And I avoided most of the televised commemorations during the football games today because it seems that in too many quarters bombast has become confused with remembrance and people too often try to play a game of more-maudlin-than-thou, a form of showy commemoration theater that is really about the person doing the showing.

I think about 9/11 sometimes when I hear the Sarah Palins dividing the country along the lines of real Americans and whoever their implied opposite is. New York City, and greater Washington, DC were the targets on 9/11. The east coast. More than 2900 Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom lived their lives in the America that Sarah Palin scorns for ratings, perished on that horrible Tuesday morning. It's useful to say that we were all victims on that day but of course some paid a far greater price than others.

9/11 became politicized as so much has in the past decade or so. I suppose I'm doing so now. President Bush handled those first few days when we were scared and angry and confused as well as anyone could have and there seemed to be a time when a terrible event might have united us as a country for the long run. Politics could have gone on but without quite the edge and without the implication that the person who thinks differently from you is somehow an enemy. That new era of consensus politics never came to pass and if anything things got more poisonous as 9/11 receded into the stuff of commemoration.

We all hope that we never experience an event of that magnitude again. But even as people blurt out or remind us on bumper stickers never to forget we seem to have forgotten much of the essence of what it is that we are not to forget. No one who lived through it will ever forget 9/11 and those who have tried to claim that day for their own agenda tend to be the most convinced that they need to remind us. I just wish we could do a better job of remembering exactly what we are not supposed to forget.

Hypocrisy Watch

Here is how it apparently works among the new wave of GOP debt-busters, with their supposedly fierce anti-earmark bona fides: If you do it, it's pork. If I do it, it's a project of vital importance.

A Race-y Tea Party

The Tea Party Movement and its defenders go apoplectic when they are accused of being driven in any way shape or form by racism. yet the politics of racial resentment are so close to the surface, the examples so prominent, that one almost wonders where to draw the line between racial resentment and racism. And then something like this happens and helps clarify the picture once again.

Well, That Sucks

Yeay! The Free Market is Awesome!

Oh, wait, depending on whose definition we are using the free market can be awful?

Oh, dammit. The world is complex and sloganeering does not actually help describe the world?

But I was reassured by a sloganeering and bumper stickering world.

Motor Trend KO's Limbaugh

Todd Lassa at Motor Trend kicks the living shit out of Rush Limbaugh's (and to a somewhat lesser extent George Will's) ill-informed (imagine that!) tirades against the Chevy Volt. It is glorious to behold.

[Hat Tip.]

Goodnight Consensus

In today's Boston Globe Joan Wickersham uses Amazon reader responses to the venerable children's classic Goodnight Moon as something of a metaphor for our times.

(By the way, put me in the column of those who loathe the so-called "democracy" of anonymous, unfiltered Amazon reviews. Yeah, yeah, I'm an elitist. Since when is "elite" a bad thing?)

Liberalism is Right

Obama is fundamentally right. Just keep that in mind.

On Obama and Africa

At the Foreign Policy Association you can see my latest "Viewpoints" article, "On Obama and Africa," in which I give my take on the Dinesh D'Souza-Newt Gingrich idiocy in which they asserted that Obama is informed by a "Kenyan anti-colonialist world view."

[Cross-posted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

Debunking the Kennedy-Nixon TV Myth

At Slate David Greenberg challenges much of the accumulated mythology and misunderstanding surrounding the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. His basic argument: the election did not hinge on the contrast in appearance between the two men on television.

Stupid is As Stupid Does

You remember my argument that it is completely idiotic to try to make political generalizations abut a sport (you know, like associating soccer with socialism despite the fact that the National Football League is by just about any definition the most socialist professional sports league on earth)? Well, conservatives are at it again. Now they are claiming baseball as a conservative sport.

Is it stupidity? Is it rank dishonesty? At a certain point with modern-day conservatives it really isn't cost-effective to make the distinction, now is it?

Tootle Bait

Robert Samuelson has an op-ed on one of Tootle's bete noirs, bumper stickers and politics, at The Washington Post.

Eurovision's Sublime Gifts

One of the true joys of The New Yorker is the fact that some of the best articles are the ones you read on a lark. Like everyone who subscribes to Eustace Tilly's magazine, I find that it arrives faster than I can read them so most weeks they get a judicious skimming (if that). But when I take the time there are always these glorious little gifts of writing.

I am still catching up on magazines that amassed while I was out of the country (and have continued to pile up relentlessly since I returned). But this morning I just discovered Anthony Lane's glorious article on the Eurovision song contest from the June 28 issue, "Only Mr. God Knows Why." You can access the abstract here (and if you are a subscriber can download the digital edition). But if you cannot get past the firewall, get thee to a library. Lane's article takes the perfect approach to the indescribably awful yet simultaneously mesmerizing carnival of kitsch and crap that is Eurovision.

(And after Lane amuses you, you may as well go and stew in fury and frustration while reading George Packer's August 9 article on the Senate, which carries the apt title "The Broken Chamber.")

Windbags and Moneybags

What kind of politicians find the Tea Party attractive? According to Ed Kilgore "windbags and moneybags."

A Catch Up Links Dump

My best intentions have been to get a lot of blogging done here. But reality (I am still a long way from catching up from my trip, for example) has interceded. So here are a number of stories that have caught my attention, with commentary as apt:

The imbroglio over the Muslim cultural center-cum-mosque a couple of blocks from ground Zero is driven by two interrelated factors: Pure bigotry and rank political opportunism. There is no excuse for trying to exclude any particular religious group from building in the area, never mind one that has long had a presence there. People don't have a right not to be offended or to be made to feel uncomfortable. But beyond that, feeling uncomfortable just by the very presence of Muslims is pretty strong evidence of pretty vile prejudice. I know, I know -- conservatives have tried to turn the tables on those who accuse them of bigotry, making the accusation somehow as bad as the actual act of being a bigot. But that's nonsense, and we need to keep pointing it out at every turn. Oh: and the critics are playing right into the actual extremists' hands. (There has been tons of commentary on this. Almost literally to pick two at random, see Richard Cohen at the WaPo and William Saletan at Slate.)

The 1980 Olympic boycott was a terrible thing, especially for its victims, the athletes who never got to compete. But that does not make the decision wrong or bad. It may well have been the best option in a scenario where there were few good options. Let's dispense with the pablum that sports and politics should never mix. Virtually the entire history of the Olympics (or for that matter sport) is inseparable from politics. Was it really a better option to go to Moscow, providing legitimacy, exposure, and financial support (directly and indirectly) to what was still at the time our enemy -- so much so that Ronald Reagan would soon after label the Soviets the "Evil Empire"? Once the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, there were no good options and considerable bad ones for President Carter when it came to the Moscow Olympics.

The senate recently unanimously (you read that right) passed a bill that, in the words of a New York Times editorial, "protects Americans from the whims of foreign libel judgments." This is important. A while back I was working with an editor on something about Zimbabwe that I was working on. I had written something pointed about Robert Mugabe and he pretty much told me that my commentary on Mugabe would likely lead us both into a potential libel suit. I thought at the time that he was overreacting (and refused to temper my writing, and so we parted ways) but I also knew that the British court system has often been used for libel fishing expeditions. And as someone who often writes for audiences outside of the United States it would be nice to know that the next David Irving won't be able to take me for all I'm worth. (Note to potential litigants: remember Steve Dallas' first law of being a lawyer: never, ever sue poor people.)

Not that we really needed studies to confirm it, but sports are good for girls.

A trifecta from The Chronicle of Higher Education: The New York Times recently stacked the decks in a forum discussion about university tenure (against tenure, I should add). Conservatives recently selectively used or plain misrepresented the arguments of a book on elite college admissions. And UT-Austin will be the focal point of the latest court action over affirmative action.

Finally, Charles Pierce wonders if the Jets, everyone's preseason favorites, are not in for a mighty disappointment. Amen. It's not like there is anyone else in the Jets' division that has had any success over the last decade or so.

Soccer and Socialism: The Real Connection

When I think about the nature of soccer in the United States I, perhaps bizarrely, am reminded of Werner Sombart's famous question, "Why is there no socialism in America?" That was one of my advisor's favorite questions to slip into a comprehensive exam (though I never got to tackle it in that format).

And I always had an answer that I thought was at least somewhat counterintuitive. In brief: In the period when Sombart lived and posed the question, there was and is socialism in America. It's just that in a two-party system having a few hundred thousand or a handful of million supporters means that you are a virtual nonentity. Socialist candidates and their allies scored several hundred thousand votes in myriad presidential elections in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In a parliamentary system they would have had a voice, and may have joined in coalitions with the major parties, giving them some power. But ours is not a system friendly to third parties, and none, including the socialists, have yet gained traction to the point of being a viable long-term force in American politics. It might happen someday, but the system so far has been resilient enough to fend off or co-opt such challenges.

In a very broad sense, the same thing can be said for soccer in America, though soccer and socialism otherwise have nothing in common, idiot conservative critics notwithstanding. The NFL is by just about any measure the most socialist sports league on Earth. After all, who benefits from sales of a Tom Brady jersey? Does that money go to Tom Brady? Nope. To the team for which he plays? Nope. It's split up evenly among every team in the league. Do the Cowboys get more television revenue than the Lions, given how many more people tune in to watch the Cowboys? Nope. TV revenue is split up amongst the comrades of the NFL. There may be plenty of reasons to like or dislike a sport. But tying it to one's political worldview is not one of them, and doing so is inane. All team sports are, I suppose, "socialistic" inasmuch as the individual subsumes him or her self to the larger whole. And by that measure all individual sports are more capitalistic, or democratic, or free, or what have you. But would you want to watch sports with a dullard who sees the world through such a knee-jerk and politicized lens?

People are always asking when soccer is going to take off in the United States. But it already has. And not just among kids. Soccer is tremendously popular in many circles in the US. It just is not as popular as our version of football or as baseball, or as basketball. But I have no reason to believe that it cannot surpass, if it has not already surpassed, hockey as the fourth major team sport in the United States. Furthermore, part of the reason why Americans have not embraced (but nor have they rejected) the MLS to the degree MLS boosters would hope, is that increasingly we can all watch English Premier League, La Liga, and of course the Champions League -- the best soccer in the world, in other words -- live in our living rooms.

If the two-party dominance in American politics has blinded us to undercurrents of discontent beneath the surface, the dominance of a handful of team sports, with massive fragmentation beneath those sports, has led many of us to be blind about just how big soccer is in the United States. We are not waiting for soccer to blossom here. It is blossoming. It has blossomed. And it will continue to do so.

Theocracy, Hypocrisy, Idiocy

Charles Pierce adequately sums up the hypocrisy of jumping all over Dwyane Wade for his (generally misrepresented) reference to 9/11 the other day. People invoke 9/11 constantly. It is usually unseemly. But when it fits a political agenda no one complains even though it is no more justifiable.

The most obnoxious example is this whole ginned up controversy over building a Mosque and cultural center a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. There is no legitimate case to be made for banning the construction except the very sort of theocratic religious intolerance that is supposed to make the bad guys the bad guys. So I suppose it's a real controversy borne of either crass political grandstanding or overt religious bigotry and perhaps a little of both.

Thinking LBJ in RSA

I'm beginning to have one foot in both of my worlds now. Obviously I'm still physically here in South Africa and will be for another week. At the same time, for UTPB's second summer session I am teaching a graduate seminar, "LBJ's America," that started last night. For this first week I am conducting the class via email, and they have a host of assignments that they need to be responsible for, including getting going on their final projects. I also have a proxy conducting class for me, so all of my bases are covered.

While my obsessions for the past month have been almost exclusively tied to the World Cup and larger questions about sports and politics and the history of soccer in South Africa I am now also thinking about LBJ, both as a symbol for the culture wars but also in terms of his place in modern American history. The first book we are reading is Robert Dallek's one-volume biography of LBJ, a truncated version of his two-volume masterpiece. The title of his second volume, "Flawed Giant," which covers the period from when the big Texan became Vice President through his death pretty accurately sums up Johnson both as a man and as a politician. We will be exploring the 1960s, and especially the period from 1963, through the lens of one of the era's dominant figures.

In the meantime, the semi-finals of the World Cup commence today. As the rate of games slows, South Africa is slightly less World Cup besotted. As usual you can read more here.

Getting Linky

A few stories that have piqued my interest:

Sports Illustrated has a great article on Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas, who has more caps for Wales than any player in that country's history. He also is openly gay. And he is still playing. The question that motivates Gary Smith's article is when will there be an openly gay player in American team sports?

Conservatives always seem to predict apocalypse when it comes to social reform and economic regulation. And they are almost always completely wrong.

I don't think I have ever seen a Powerpoint presentation that did not detract a lot more than it added. Most people who use Powerpoint use it as a crutch to cover up their inability to convey material well. As a result students come to rely upon it as if it were necessary. It looks like many in the US military agree with me.

Here is an experiment all married people should get behind: Try to do it every day for a month. (Honey? Are you reading?)