The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

Something to read today.

Why are American soldiers in Afghanistan? To what end are they dying? When will their mission be accomplished? Honestly, I have no idea. The whole situation looks to me more and more like this.

I am no expert, but I agree with this.

The paranoid style of the rump:



George Packer:

“This is a defining moment, and there is overwhelming empathy with folks who are scared to death about the direction this country is going,” Senator Saxby Chambliss, of Georgia, told Politico. Not to be outdone, Representative Michele Bachmann, of Minnesota, told an approving Sean Hannity, on his radio show, “Where freedom is tried, the people rejoice. But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn.” And Fox News’s Glenn Beck, who had earlier equated Obamaism with socialism and Communism, revised his analysis: “They’re marching us toward 1984. . . . Like it or not, fascism is on the rise.” Footage of goose-stepping Nazis played across the screen behind him.

This is what the historian Richard Hofstadter has called “the paranoid style in American politics.” In the world of intelligence, it’s known as mirror-imaging: in this case, seeing in an enemy’s mental structure a reflection of one’s own feverish simplifications. Conservatives will not be able to understand the elusive nature of Obamaism and counter its formidable appeal until they remove the impediment of their own insular, rigid ideology.

Michael Cohen:

However, Beck’s paranoid style is seeping into the discourse of conservative politics, which should be of concern to Republicans. The charge that President Barack Obama is a socialist, first raised in the 2008 campaign, has become a de rigueur epithet heard not only on talk radio but in the halls of Congress. Calls by China to consider replacing the dollar as the global reserve currency have been met by bizarre warnings from congressional Republicans that the Obama administration wants to scrap the greenback for a new global currency. Thirty-four House Republicans have even signed on to a constitutional amendment that would prevent this from occurring, though no such proposal is being considered.

Rick Moran:

Beck worries me. Conservatives worry me. I worry about myself. I feel trapped in a huge ball of cotton, trying gamely to make my way out but don’t know which direction to start pushing. I am losing contact with those conservatives who find Beck anything more than a clown - and an irrational one at that. Same goes for those who worship at the altar of Rush, Hannity, Coulter, and the whole cotton candy conservative crowd. I can’t take those people seriously. The fact that they are popular mystifies me. Our heroes 20 years ago were Reagan, Buckley, Fitzpatrick, Kirk, Goldwater, Anderson, and others who didn’t see conservatism as a meal ticket but as something to think about, to write about and contemplate man’s place in the world and his relationship to government and God.

I know we're all supposed to be "post-racial" now, but I can't help but recognize today that a Kenyan-American President of the United States of America met with the Queen of England.

Walking by the Boone County Courthouse this gray and rainy morning, I saw the World War I memorial. It reads:

IN MEMORY OF BOONE COUNTY BOYS WHO
LOST THEIR LIVES IN THE WORLD WAR

If they were making a war memorial today, the only words that would be the same perhaps would be "In Memory" and "Boone County." Certainly today the inscription wouldn't connote such senseless tragedy and despair - children's lives ... lost.

Today is the 173rd anniversary of the fall of the Alamo.

My friend Amanda has this wonderful thing as the link on her gmail status. Perhaps Amanda is in love with A. Lincoln too.

I think Matt Cooper is correct in pointing out that race relations were pretty lousy just twenty years ago in addition to forty years ago. They were especially lousy in St. Louis, where the population was (and still very much is) segregated, and where a series of overtly racial city-wide campaigns only exacerbated the fear and mistrust. And on the national stage it was the era of Willie Horton, Pat Buchanan, and "white hands."

When I was a freshman in high school way back in 1991, I made friends with the kid who sat behind me in homeroom. He lived on the North Side. Once my dad drove me up to his house so we could hang out. It was a little weird stepping out of the car, because there were folks outside on the block obviously wondering what in the heck a white kid was doing up there. It wasn't hostile or anything - you could just tell that a white 13 year-old kid was a rare a sight on that block.

If the roles and neighborhoods had been reversed, it would probably have been the same (though I fear it could have been slightly weirder).

Not that anything is perfect now, but I think things are generally a little bit less tense - a little bit less "weird" - between people of different races than they used to be.

And like I said, things aren't perfect.

But the fact that we are about to inaugurate a wildly popular black guy as our nation's president is pretty encouraging. No way this would have happened when I was 13.

America is back.

One starts to feel we're heading for deep economic caca when even the Wall Street Journal's pages call for not only S&L bailout-style programs, but also Great Depression-style programs.

I'm taking a course called Fair Housing this term, which reminded me of the story of Pruitt-Igoe. Here's the part of Koyaanisqatsi featuring the housing project:



More photographs of Pruitt-Igoe here. Pruitt-Igoe was demolished 5 years before I was born, but I remember very clearly the shells of buildings known as Darste-Webbe. It's hard to find a photo of the Darst-Webbe buildings online, but here are some of the buildings in the background of this picture.

Growing up in St. Louis in the 80s was really strange in that giant swaths of buildings seemed to have gone empty overnight. My neighborhood wasn't like that, but these giant swaths were only minutes away. A totally different world right next to mine.

Happy Labor Day.

I heartily agree with this:

Whatever similarities exist between the current campaign and ones in the past, they have no predictive value whatsoever. History does not repeat itself so precisely that it is possible to predict the future based on past analogies. That is a common, but sophist, way of understanding the world.

Every election season has its own peculiarities and concurrent dynamics. We currently have an out-going two term president who nevertheless is almost radioactive in terms of his popularity. There's this thing now called the internet, and it seems that just about everybody uses it. There's a black guy heading the ticket of a major party. Until very recently, the other guy running for president was continuously accused by his party's faithful of being a RINO. There's a really unpopular war going on, but no draft to really bring it home. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It seems that the main offenders of the analogy crime are the wise Washington pundit types. Most of the time, I think it's just a desire for people like George Will or Cokie Roberts to impress us with their supposed knowledge and readily apparent longevity. "This is reminiscent of '72. I'll never forget that time I was reporting from the floor of the Democratic Convention and George McGovern ... (see how smart and connected and wise I am? See? See?)"

But other times, I think that people commit the analogy crime in order to push a narrative while seeming "objective." When a pundit says McCain '08 is just like Dole '96, or Obama '08 is just like Dukakis '88, then how much of that analogy is objectively "predictive" and how much of it is actually a partisan dig? I'd say it's mostly the latter.

When I was in college I played in the college's big band. One of the charts we did one year was the theme to the television show Mannix. Nothing like a big band jazz waltz, I tell you. Anyway, as we would play the song I always imagined the accompanying visuals that would go with the opening theme. For the most part, I think I imagined correctly. Take it away, Lalo:



I've never seen an episode of Mannix, but it looks pretty awesome. The show still has its die-hard fans, too.

I should have posted this yesterday, what with the anniversary of Nixon's resignation announcement and the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing.

Selections from John Adams' Nixon in China: