June 2008 Acquisitions

Books:
Gustavo Arellano, ¡Ask a Mexican!, 2007, 2008.
Sam Stephenson and Alan Trachtenberg, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project, 2001, 2003.

DVDs:
Control, 2007.
Square Pegs: The Complete Series, 2008.

Working-Class Blues

"Managed capitalism, which allowed most Americans to prosper in the latter part of the 20th century, has been gradually dismantled. We now have a government that serves the interests of corporations rather than those of its citizens. The book's lack of an examination of what this transformation means for our future gives a cut-and-paste feel to the individual stories, which is accentuated by charts and graphs. He includes too many leaden recapitulations of material in previous chapters.
"The chapters, organized under such headings as jobs, health, housing, education, the poor and retirement, allow Gosselin to show pieces of the puzzle. They are important pieces. But unless we grasp that there is a dark logic to this transformation, that an engorged and empowered new oligarchy holds our economic and political life hostage to corporate interests and profits, we cannot grasp the grave implications for our future."

In the Los Angeles Times, Chris Hedges reviews Peter Gosselin's High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.


"Democrats have disdained so-called social issues as distractions from real economic problems. Douthat and Salam say to the contrary that the social issues are a major part of working-class insecurity. 'Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity and vibrant religious and civic institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy and upwardly mobile. Public disorder, family disintegration, cultural fragmentation and civic and religious disaffection, on the other hand, breed downward mobility and financial strain—which in turn breeds further social dislocation, in a vicious cycle that threatens to transform a working class into an underclass.'"

And in The New York Times, Norman Ornstein reviews Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

Empty Cup

"'We won! We won!' the lockup's notorious chief of intelligence, Jorge 'El Tigre' (The Tiger) Acosta, shouted over and over, recalled Graciela Daleo, a survivor. 'When he said, "We won," I was certain that we had lost,' Daleo said in a seminal documentary film made here examining the 'parallel history' of the 1978 championship. 'And we did lose.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Patrick J. McDonnell looks back to Argentina and the 1978 World Cup.

A Tracking Shot Is a Moral Act

Christopher Bray and Anne Billson review Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard in The Telegraph.

Gun Crazy

"If the terms 'judicial activism' and 'judicial restraint' have any meaning, it is that a court is activist when it is invalidating laws and overruling precedent, and restrained when deferring to popularly elected legislatures and following prior decisions.
"Never before had the Supreme Court found that the 2nd Amendment bestows on individuals a right to have guns. In fact, in 1939 (and other occasions), the court rejected this view. In effectively overturning these prior decisions, the court both ignored precedent and invalidated a law adopted by a popularly elected government."

In the Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky criticizes the Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller.

Bananas Split

"Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here. They became a staple only after the men who in the late 19th century founded the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) figured out how to get bananas to American tables quickly—by clearing rainforest in Latin America, building railroads and communication networks and inventing refrigeration techniques to control ripening. The banana barons also marketed their product in ways that had never occurred to farmers or grocers before, by offering discount coupons, writing jingles and placing bananas in schoolbooks and on picture postcards. They even hired doctors to convince mothers that bananas were good for children."

Dan Koeppel in The New York Times questions the future of the banana.

"Too Big to Fit on a Lapel Pin"

"Consider this: The Lakota Sioux offered some of the most fierce resistance to the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, but in the decades that followed, Lakota artists regularly incorporated the design of the U.S. flag into their beadwork, painting and weaving. What those stars and stripes meant to the Lakota artists could vary widely: In their hands, the U.S. flag could be a gesture of their new allegiance, a plea for justice from the U.S., a symbol of the nation for which their young men were now fighting or simply a decorative motif they knew to be popular with collectors. It might have been all of these things at the same time."

In the Los Angeles Times, Michael A. Elliott considers Native-American patriotism on the 132nd anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.


"If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama's original answer about the flag pin: 'I won't wear that pin on my chest,' he said last fall. 'Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.' Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is? "The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn't about honoring and replicating the past; it's about surpassing it."

And Peter Beinart in Time compares liberal and conservative patriotism.

Space Is the Place

"Echoes of Sun Ra and NOI are audible in the music of George Clinton, who must have had both in mind when he transformed Parliament from a doo-wop group into a mother-ship-worshipping acid-funk congregation in the 1970s. Clinton's mother ship, of course, was likelier to drop megatons of booty and cocaine than warheads, but hedonism wasn't the only goal. In the opening bars of 'Mother Ship Connection,' Clinton announces, "We have returned to claim the pyramids"—a nod to paleocontact theories, which hypothesize that ancient astronauts shared technological secrets with North Africans. Perceptible in this ripple of the Afronaut impulse is the yearning for and fantastical reclamation of an ennobling African history: A trip to space doubles as a return to roots."

Jonah Weiner in Slate explores the "Afronaut tradition" in black music.

George Carlin, 1937-2008

Mel Watkins in The New York Times writes an obit for comedian George Carlin.

Park Life

"Unfortunately, Los Angeles--a great city by most definitions--has no important downtown park. Griffith Park meets many needs, but it's not in the center of the city. The Cornfield, north of Chinatown, is also removed from the action (and mostly not off the drawing board). The public space that links downtown's civic center buildings may get a polish as part of the Grand Avenue project, but it's tucked away, hemmed in by government buildings. None of these alone is the great, open-air city gathering place that L.A. needs.
"It is time for something bold and visionary."

Vaughan Davies in the Los Angeles Times makes a proposal.

Point/Counterpoint

I Know It's Crazy, But Some Days I Feel Like Everybody Is Out To Get Me
By Liz Hawkins
"Ever had one of those days where nothing seems to go right? I sure have. When everything is falling apart and you just can't get ahead, it's like the whole world is out to get you. Today was just like that."

Our Mission Has Been Compromised! Abort!
By Commander Dutch Yancy
"No. No. No. Dear God, this is the moment we feared. She's on to us. Blue Team, pull out! Repeat, PULL OUT. Mission Make Liz Hawkins' Life Insufferable has been compromised. Execute code Omega. Teams Salad Dressing and Minor Computer Malfunctions, abandon your stations. Abandon your stations! This is not a drill. I want you all out of there. Now! Let's move! Move! Move!"

From The Onion.

Clark Kerr's Campus

By way of an endnote in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, the Late Adopter finds that in 2002 the San Francisco Chronicle published "Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare," a special report revealing how the FBI's "covert campaign to disrupt the Free Speech Movement and topple UC President Clark Kerr helped launch the political career of an actor named Ronald Reagan."

A Crash Course for the Ravers

"By 1958, there were more than 4,000 'ozoners' (as Variety called them) in the United States. They’ve been going extinct ever since.
"Numerous culprits—the Cold War, UFOs, the British Invasion, television, sound problems—have been blamed. But in the end, it may have been simply that another American fad had run its course.
"Or has it?"

Mark Groubert in the LA Weekly visits the last remaining drive-in theater in Los Angeles County.

The Conservative Descent

"Holding aside whether these policies would work--I leave that question to the policy experts--such ideas, at least for the moment, have no prospect of support inside the Republican Party, as currently dominated by three key constituencies: the religious right, the neoconservatives, and the pro-business, anti-tax radicals. The age of Reagan, growing out of the distempers of the 1960s and 1970s, gradually produced a Republican Party very different from the one he led to victory. Ever since, the GOP has devoted itself to conducting crusades rather than to conducting the business of politics and government. Gone is the willingness to compromise and maneuver that helped make Reagan himself a successful politician and president. Gone, too, is almost any trace of the moderate Republicanism that, under Reagan, helped check the more zealous ideologues inside the White House. With Bush leaving office, there will no longer be even a remnant of the old party establishment that Reagan married to the New Right."

In The American Prospect, Sean Wilentz reviews Donald T. Critchlow's The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, David Frum's Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, and Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

Silk Stockings

Robert Berkvist in The New York Times reports the death of actress and dancer Cyd Charisse.

Fantasy Headlines

"Amnesty International reports massive drop in detainments"
"President signs single-payer health care into law"
"Economic Gap Narrowing As Real Wages Rise"

These headlines and more are available on a fantasy Google News page.

Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette

"To capture voters in coal country and smokestack towns, he needs an old-fashioned coffin nail. Unfiltered Camels come to mind, except Joe Camel has been tarred as a come-on to children. Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch—a slogan better suited to bruised Clinton supporters. And Marlboro, reported to be Mr. Obama’s brand before he quit, evokes the wide open spaces and low-electoral-vote country of Montana or Wyoming.
"So my choice would be Winston, which was the longtime sponsor of Nascar. Or, perhaps, Mr. Obama could take up smokeless tobacco. I’m sure the campaign can poll this kind of thing."

Tony Horwitz in The New York Times recommends that Barack Obama should resume smoking cigarettes.

"Christianity in Action"

"In 1918, Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning America's entry into World War I; before that, free speech protections were more a matter of custom, easily dispensed with during wartime, than of high legal principle. But his 10-year sentence raised 1st Amendment issues with unprecedented force. Sixty-three years old and in poor health, Debs faced the prospect of dying in prison. His drama played out against a backdrop of revolutionary violence both here and abroad: While he was serving his sentence, a bomb planted by anarchists ripped through a busy Wall Street intersection, killing more than 30 people and injuring 200.
"Freeberg shows that in the end it was Debs' popularity, not a knockdown legal argument, that compelled politicians, the mainstream media and eventually federal judges to reconsider the government's power to jail dissidents."

Peter Richardson reviews Ernest Freeberg's Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent in the Los Angeles Times.

"Life Doesn’t Count for Much Unless You’re Willing to Do Your Small Part to Leave Our Children—All of Our Children—a Better World"

Barack Obama speaks on Father's Day at Apostolic Church of God in Chicago.

No Laughing Matter

"Humor and victory are different matters entirely. To understand what makes the perfect caption, you must start with the readership. Paging through The New Yorker is a lonesome withdrawal, not a group activity. The reader is isolated and introspective, probably on the train commuting to work. He suffers from urban ennui. He does not make eye contact. Laughing out loud is, in this context, an unseemly act sure to draw unwanted attention. To avoid this, your caption should elicit, at best, a mild chuckle. The first filter for your caption should be: Is it too funny? Will it make anyone laugh out loud? If so, throw it out and work on a less funny one."

Patrick House in Slate offers advice as to how to win The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.

And on his blog, Daniel Radosh offers advice as to how to win his Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.