This time Henninger's villains are the so-called "teachers" who are doing the latest revision of the Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum for the College Board. (Apparently they revise the thing every couple of years. Parson Weems and the Pledge of Allegiance aren't good enough for these tenured radicals!)
"The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive," says Henninger. (And why might that be? Sounds like some little pinkos have a guilty conscience.) These pencil-necks are deaf to the "pushback" to the revise that has "emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia," the intellectual jewels of our nation, and to the 56 real "professors and historians" who have signed a petition against it. No, they bask instead in the approval of something called the American Historical Association, which sure sounds like a union to me. And New York magazine and "one liberal newspaper columnist" have had the audacity to make fun of these good Americans; why, that's double Orwell with a side of Alinsky!
There's more, including a quotation from a non-committal press release from the historians (to give Henninger's readers that got-'em-on-the-run feeling cultural warriors crave) and a tear for fallen comrade Lynn Cheney. But after all that, these are the examples from the actual revision plans Henninger picks to show us how Marxist is all is:
An example: “Native peoples and Africans in the Americas strove to maintain their political and cultural autonomy in the face of European challenges to their independence and core beliefs..."This is in direct contradiction to the "dancing darkies" and "funny drunken injun" view favored by conservative historians.
Or: “Explain how arguments about market capitalism, the growth of corporate power, and government policies influenced economic policies from the late 18th century through the early 20th century..."Market capitalism doesn't "influence," libtards -- it heals, it soothes, it liberates!
And inevitably: “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.”Apparently, even worse than acknowledging that slaves and conquered Native Americans had it tough is acknowledging that they had feelings and human interactions at all.
Maybe as soon he wrote these down Henninger realized he had nothin', because immediately he goes for the bullshit totem of the hour:
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld got attention this week for saying he understood why other comics such as Chris Rock have stopped performing on campuses beset by political correctness...See, it all adds up! A pattern is emerging in all their P.C. hoo-hah: Their ideas fail, and they blame censorship rather than acknowledge that a growing number of people are figuring out they're full of shit.
UPDATE. In comments, whetstone points out that I missed Henninger's coup de horseshit:
At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous.Try and guess how Henninger will prove their disingenuity. Give up? Here:
From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.The history teachers are disingenuous, see, because they claim to believe in debate, yet who's going to debate their assertion that slaveowners and conquerors believed they were superior to their subjects? The only possible reason is Orwell! Perhaps Henninger and his buddies should publish a study guide to prepare students to contest this point of view; better still, a video; even better a Vine, showing Brad Pitt being nice to Chiwetel Ejiofor, then a card that says YEARS PASS, and then a clip of Ben Carson at CPAC.
If hoo-hahs really were P.C., I'd be a lot more polite. Or less of an Apple geek. Or something.
ReplyDeleteSorry, even reading the brief quotes of Henninger above seem to have disoriented me. (Oops, was that un-P.C.?)
So American history should only be for white guys. You can't read their crybaby screeds any other way, once you erase the chimp-with-a-monocle pomposity.
ReplyDeleteDaniel Henninger starts his Wall Street Journal column with a description of the Memory Hole from 1984
ReplyDeleteNNNNGGGGG... Okay, wingnuts, here's the deal: you stop using references to 1984 until you can discuss the whole section there in the middle that YOU NEVER FUCKING READ all about authoritarianism and its political uses, mmmmkay?
Well, they're pretty open that history should only be ABOUT white guys, so...
ReplyDeleteI recall, during drunken dorm debates in college not that long ago, that anyone referencing 1984 without any irony was automatically considered a n00b. But I guess that was just us silencing them like the commienazi libruls we were.
ReplyDeletecan the most-important-election-in-our-lives start, already? this is some pretty weak-tea hate.
ReplyDeleteThese guys take their history like their religion: there's only one appropriate version, it was written down hundreds of years ago, and the text associated with it should be read as uncritically as possible.
ReplyDeleteAt one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as
ReplyDeletewell.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous. From Key Concept
1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify
their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several
different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.
Look, I'm used to conservatives flopping like Premier League strikers when faced with the most anodyne consideration of American history's darker, um, details, but this is beyond the pale.
The "Orwellian option" is to not contest it because Orwell would tell that student he's a fucking moron. You want Orwellian? Start with "Shooting an Elephant."
I don't know how you contest that. Many Europeans *didn't*? Who did, then? Time-traveling Obama?
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm perfectly willing to have people referencing 1984 non-ironically - just let me know you've READ the damn thing more than once in its entirety.
ReplyDeleteWhat pisses me off is conservatives spewing Orwell when they have no clue he described himself as a democratic Socialist. It's a small issue of mine.
Oh, I like 1984. And Animal Farm. But you can only hear so many rounds of This Dorm's Policy is Orwellian, the Dining Hall's Hours are Orwellian, etc.
ReplyDeleteAAAAAHHHH:
ReplyDelete"It happened because weak school administrators and academics empowered
tireless activists who forced all of American history and life through
the four prisms of class, gender, ethnicity and identity. What emerged
at the other end was one idea—guilt. I exist, therefore I must be
guilty. Of something."
It's times like this I'm grateful for the remnants of Calvinism in my family.
I seem to recall "Burma Days" is all about the subjugation of the "child races", not that anyone reads it. "Shooting an Elephant" is probably better in this case - sheesh, Orwell saw up close and personal subjugation!
ReplyDeleteHence my request of an embargo on references unless you can discuss the parts idiots skip over.
ReplyDeleteCritical thinking?
ReplyDeleteYou SUBVERSIVE.
Henninger wants nothing short of a rewrite of history, because in the great American pageant, it turns out that some whites are even whiter than others, and we can't have little white children knowing that for want of a dollar, you can be just as black as they want you to be:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Riots
In fact, they'll gun your cracker ass down in the street.
It makes the Wall Street Journal uncomfortable when people realize that the American Revolution, like its counterpart in France, choked to death in its crib.
Both largely to the emerging economies of scale that found too many obstacles in monarchy, and too little opportunity for obscene concentrations of wealth in democracies.
The Little Pup just took APUSH, & I stuck my snout into the reviewing. Yes, all that stuff about Seneca Falls & LaFollette would seem leftist to a troglodyte.
ReplyDeleteFrom where I sat, it was a really good course. Not many High School courses where kids learn anywhere near that amount of material. A much wider view than just preznits & wars (which they did cover).
Hmm, let me give it a shot. Not very many Europeans did,* most of them were busy dying of cholera and dirt farming.
ReplyDelete*A handful of influential Europeans did make some noise about white superiority, and they did have some effect on policy and the markets.
I'm not a subscriber to the WSJ so all I could read was the first paragraph of Henninger's column. Doesn't matter, the bullshit was already in second gear before even that ended.
ReplyDeleteThe memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.
Orwell's memory hole was not about "separating society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas." It was about erasing facts, something that every right-winger does the second their fingers hit the keyboard. I'm really glad I can't read the rest beyond what Roy quoted.
His problem with memory holes is not that they disappear stuff, it's that they don't work as well as George Orwell said they should. Parts of American history, long-suppressed, now get a wider audience? I guess that's only a problem if you don't want that specific history taught, and clearly his problem with that specific history is **dog-whistle**.
ReplyDelete(his article btw, straight from the Malkin shit-flume. I won't link but it got blast-faxed to the usual clown-posse a few days ago)
See? See?
ReplyDeleteThey don't even fucking read the goddamn book.
1984 ITSELF has gone down the memory hole for these yoicks.
Never unfair to point out that wingers tend to flush the most important parts of 1984 down a memory hole.
ReplyDeleteeven better a Vine, showing Brad Pitt being nice to Chiwetel Ejiofor,
ReplyDeletethen a card that says YEARS PASS, and then a clip of Ben Carson at CPAC.Good start, but needs a little tweaking. You need to make it clearer that Ejiofor's character wasn't subjugated, and that Pitt's character isn't acting out of white paternalism. More actual lies, in other words.
I don't either. And it's not like this attitude was confined to North America, my limey ancestors took this point of view literally all over the world.
ReplyDeleteAnd even the history written down hundreds of years ago has multiple versions, there were debates going on even then, there are new source materials being unearthed regularly. There was never one appropriate version handed down without question (until the recent batch of liberals came out of the woodwork to scribble a funny mustache on the distinguished portrait of George Washington).
ReplyDeleteALINSKY!!!
ReplyDeleteLook, as a Conservative, I want my child to grow to adulthood as ignorant as possible while still having the appearance of having attended school. No, check that: I want my child as filled with mis- and mal-information as possible. Whether the subject is sex (abstinence only works!!!), science (if it's called a theory, then it can't be true!!!), history (White is right and Amerca rulz, foolz!!!), or social studies (Blacks are naturally intellectually inferior--sez so right in the book!!!), my kid should be sent forth into an increasing competitive world as crippled as he or she can possibly be. [/snark]
ReplyDeleteBTW: Thanks for the help on the fundraiser! Slight issue: Mom's having second thoughts about the house in Fairport, so we're looking again, but we still want this over ASAP.
ReplyDeleteMake sure to teach him Creationism as well, particularly if you're looking to have him work in Biology!
ReplyDeleteReady to blow some minds? Most of the people in the 19th century who originated the idea that the US unfairly subjugated and exploited women, minorities, and the working classes were themselves white evangelical protestants.
ReplyDeleteBut that's just it: Finding new source material is considered "revisionist" by these people. It's not "Hey, we thought this was X, but this record kept by Joe Dokes and corroborated by this other record kept by Jim Shoes proves conclusively that it is actually X and Y and 142!" To them it's, "We believe X, therefore none of this new stuff can be true!"
ReplyDelete*fingers in ears* LALALALLALALLALA CAN'T HEAR YOU
ReplyDeleteIt's less about the mustache than the teeth he took out of his slaves to put in his gums.
ReplyDeleteWhat, just because someone is a ferociously anticolonial socialist, we can't use his name as an adjective any more? That's simply Kafkaesque!
ReplyDeleteUh, no, the native Americans had lots to say about it in speeches that are on record. Slaves would have had something to say about it if they had been listened to and not terrorized for it--as it was they sang their protest into gospel music, and into the blues because well into the 20th century it was still dangerous for African Americans to call their suffering by its proper name. Women were also silenced or at least discouraged from advocating in behalf of their own political enfranchisement. Among those who advocated for justice for these groups there were many who began by listening.
ReplyDeleteYeah, yes, correct, one wouldn't think you'd have to say it, etc.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard of that being done, but I totally believe it could have been, at least once.
ReplyDeleteThese pencil-necks are deaf to the "pushback" to the revise that has "emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia," Hey, Roy finally noticed me! I am part of the pushback in Colorado, where high school kids demonstrated for weeks when the newly wingnut School board majority decided AP history was insufficiently patriotic (the kids appear to have won this round, but these bastards are sneaky). People are pissed off, and one of the non-wingnut SB member's term is up. A nice lady is running to replace her, fully aware that this volunteer position is going to give her ulcers and headaches at every SB meeting for her 2 year term; concerned moms are like that.
ReplyDeleteHere's how they pulled it off: SB elections are only on odd years because the original idea was that by not tying SB elections to the regular election cycle, they would remain non-partisan. We did not have universal mail-in ballots in 2013, but we do now; I pray that and the education effort being conducted by plenty of moms, retired teachers and other concerned citizens turns the tide. I also expect Koch money to show up soon and muddy the waters.
Don't pretend to act surprised when I tell you that 80% of the growth in the American economy over the past couple decades has been due to the invention of exotic financial instruments. Wanna guess where the profits from those wind up?
ReplyDeleteYou have my sympathies. Here in Vermont, the screeching is all about "local control" of the schools. What this translates into is my tiny town of 15,000 people has seven (7) school boards, 4 elementary schools, and an administrative structure so bloated that we're spending north of $20 million a year to "educate" under 5,000 kids.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for that "local control?" Typical school-board elections have turnouts in the single digits. Thus do we now have on one school board a man who went to prison for embezzling millions of tax dollars the last time he was involved in education here.
http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-have-always-been-told-that-george.html
ReplyDeleteThe abolitionist movement and the women's suffrage movement and the early mechanics societies were populated largely by evangelical protestants. These movements, because they were filled with whites - and, as you say, other voices were marginalized and silenced, and the labor movement was more or less openly racist at the time (though I think claiming that women were silenced makes a useful point but comes close to erasing the many eloquent female voices that did speak out for women's rights) - were the first political forces of some substance in the United States to begin to influence the writing of a counter history of America that emphasized the many instances of oppression that lay at the foundation of the US. Their publications and speeches act as a sort of alternative archive to American history. Most of the recorded testimonials of Native Americans come later in the 19th century, though we have the "Five Civilized Tribes" and their press along with artifacts of questionable authenticity like Tecumseh's famous speech at Vincennes - of course most of those writers had been converted to evangelical strains of protestantism. The abolitionist movement was mostly white, sort of by definition, though prominent African Americans were obviously members; again most of them from William Wells Brown to Frederick Douglass to Sojourner Truth were animated by a protestant theological commitment to abolition.
ReplyDeletePity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand in support of white supremacy and slavery. Orwell cried.
ReplyDeleteAccording to modern conservatives, the question become who wouldn't want to be a slave? Slaves had it great--free food, free living quarters, guaranteed work.
ReplyDeleteIt's just like conservatives think about poverty: Who wouldn't want to be poor? Free Obama phones, T-bone steaks, Cadillacs.
From that blog post you linked to: "I hasten to add that even if the slaves were paid [for the teeth], the transaction could not have been made on an equal basis."
ReplyDeleteI remember reading elsewhere, I think in a PBS feature on Washington's slaves, that the amount he paid was roughly a third of what he would have had to pay on the open market for human teeth. And - on top of that - yes, it's easy to get people to agree to your terms when you have absolute control over their lives.
And inevitably: “Students should be able to explain how various
ReplyDeleteidentities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in
different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the
formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students
should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with
each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.”
Because MELTING POT and it's horrible to maintain cultural elements from a foreign heritage and hyphenate etc etc etc when we should all just be AMERICAN. Now, let's get pizza on the way to the St Patrick's parade.
Aww Henninger's got a sad? Are those mean liberal eggheads in academia keeping score? Is it uncouth to show that naked greed backed up by violence built America just as much as a desire for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Is it unfair to point out that a certain party is the intellectual heir of the Pinkerton thugs, the John Birch Society and the League of the South, and by the way there were these organizations called the Pinkertons, the John Birch Society and the League of the South and here's what they did? Is it wrong to say that by modern standards most of the founding fathers were hypocritical, tax evading, drunken, disease ridden lechers? Is wrong to point out that while the west was won by the brave pioneers, it was being lost by the people that had lived there for ten thousand years? Does it ruin his patriotic war boner to have kids learn that the America they love was built on a continent-sized indian graveyard, that's roomy enough to accommodate the bones of a few million slaves? Does it hurt his delicate feeling to have bright eyed school kids learn they'll never see a passenger pigeon, the giant herds of plains buffalo, or the Colorado river flowing free?
ReplyDeleteHey, mackerel snappers have been white for a long time now. Like, decades. At least once conservatives figured out they'd be reliable justices on the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteHoly shit; I thought Vermont was better than that. You have my sympathies as well.
ReplyDeleteI can attest to this from my palatial digs in the front seat of my Acura where I only eat the best sub sammiches from Wal-Mart and spend my kingly $89 every two weeks on fripperies such as gas and (come Monday) new sneakers, which I shall assuredly be drinking champagne from, wooo.
ReplyDeleteThey'll be fucking lucky to ever see a ten dollar bill, the way these shitheads are going.
ReplyDeleteImagine if those fuckers would have had access to modern organ transplantation techniques.
ReplyDeleteA recent dumb pro-slavery argument I saw was that the slaves couldn't have had it so bad because they were given food and a place to sleep. Because apparently to keep a situation from being an abomination against humanity, all you need is some food and a roof over your head. That means everything's pretty much all right. Nothing else to see here, move along...
ReplyDeleteI have a feeling this is mixing up the original English abolitionists, who were evangelical, with the various progressive movements in the US associated with more fun Protestant denominations like Congregationalists. A lot of evangelicals were particularly hot against women's rights.
ReplyDeletePlease explain the meaning of "originated the idea".
ReplyDeleteYep, I can attest to this one too!
ReplyDeleteBecause Mr. Henninger is having such a difficult time with facts at home, please don't anyone tell him the Vietnamese refer to the debacle in their country between 1955 and 1975 as "The American War."
ReplyDeleteIt would blow his little mind.
A) I am including English abolitionists because they were part of the movement, with specific criticisms of the US.
ReplyDeleteB) The link you shared was to late 19 - early 20 mainline denominations being against it. In the early 19C, evangelical protestant appeals were common. The Second Great Awakening was influential in the creation of a number of "reform" movements animated by a millenarian zeal to bring Christian perfection to mankind. Women made up a majority of the converts and imbued many (though not all) of the resulting movements, sects, and churches with a concern for women's rights.
Is it wrong to say that by modern standards most of the founding fathers were hypocritical, tax evading, drunken, disease ridden lechers?
ReplyDeleteAll I can say is thank Bog for antibiotics.
Well, no wonder Washington didn't want to free his slaves. Where else would he have gotten his spare teeth?
ReplyDeleteI mean, seriously, what the fuck. No matter how bad you think it might have been, it always turns out to have been worse. And that goes for Jim Crow, too, so fuck anybody who has a "principled" objection to affirmative action.
the Dining Hall's Hours are Orwellian
ReplyDeletePicture a ladle dispensing creamed corn . . . forever.
That makes auschvitz analagous to a spa vacation. They had work shelter...low fat diet, and...showers. What more could anyone ask?
ReplyDeleteYep. And doctors used black slaves to try out new treatments. Sometimes the slaves are said to have volunteered for an experimental medical treatment when they had a terrible illness or injury that wasn't responding to other treatments… and other times the voluntariness was very much in question. (This of course leaves aside the issue of how someone with the status of chattel can't truly offer consent one way or another.)
ReplyDeleteThe Four Prisms. Their first album was light and colorful, but everything after that was just refractory.
ReplyDeleteCan we get Chinese on the way home? Or would you prefer tapas?
ReplyDeleteLet's not even go into how 1984 and Animal Farm are how-to manuals for our fascist-conservative brothers and sisters.
ReplyDeleteHistory prof friend had a student from Vietnam (here for college, not an immigrant before that) who got increasingly puzzled during a discussion of the Vietnam war in a US history class and finally raised her hand and said something like "I don't understand. That war was great for us. We won." I'm not saying that statement reflects truth and have no idea if that's basically the standard take in 2015 Vietnam, but it'd be fun for someone like Henninger to hear it.
ReplyDeleteCool.
ReplyDeleteOriginated the political critique that the history of the US is not one of freedom's advance, but instead is often based on unjust oppression. For example, it was female Americans who advocated in the early years of the Republic that American society was not a good place for women, it was one of the forces that animated the Second Great Awakening. The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen was the first organization to open free schools in New York City, because they saw it as a means of mutual class improvement. The abolitionist movement stretches back almost to the founding of European colonial presence and was the first political movement to include black voices in its policy making, in much of the British Atlantic it was an evangelical society. All to expectedly, each movement found themselves animated by an antipathy to the others at one time or another. Even the abolitionist movement was not immune to charges of white supremacy - witness the falling out between Douglass and Garrison - but I tend to think that there are very few American political institutions that do not have some white supremacy in them.
ReplyDeleteDamn, Pere! With $44.50 a week in your pocket, how come you're not cooking lobsters on your radiator?
ReplyDeleteIs Henninger really complaining about a Memory Hole? Seems more like he's pissed that it's not flushing like it used to. "ACK, the Memory Hole is backed up like the [worst] toilet [in Scotland]! I swear, I just poured in a few simple facts about Trayvon and Obama, and suddenly all this shit about slavery, the Trail of Tears, and Pinkerton goons killing strikers fucking exploded out of it! Now we have so many shitty FACTS all over the floor and there's no mop big enough -- if the wrong person stumbles in here and tries to use these facts in a debate, society will fall apart! CALL THE MEMORY HOLE ROTO ROOTER."
ReplyDeleteI take it to mean that the Vietnamese student had been taught in Viet Nam that her country won the war (which they did) and that the Vietnamese people finally achieved what had been denied them for centuries: A unified country. So, yeah--WINNING the war ended up being great for them. Fighting it? Not so much for either them or us.
ReplyDeleteI just remember reading an exerpt from the papers of some eighteenth century physician wandering around the swamps with one of his slaves and making him eat various plants. One of them made the slave break into a sweat and vomit.
ReplyDeleteI can't remember if this is how the white man "discovered" ipecacuanha, or if it was some other emetic.
That's almost as silly as electing RIck Scott governor of Florida!
ReplyDelete~
Graph: How the Financial Sector Consumed America’s Economic Growth
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tcf.org/blog/detail/graph-how-the-financial-sector-consumed-americas-economic-growth
~
That's the extended metaphor I've been visualizing...
ReplyDeleteNicely done, sir
What's super weird about this conservatard meltdown over AP History is that the new guidelines seem to be about the same as the ones applied when I took AP History back in nineteen-eighty-fucking-eight. Or even just regular history sophomore year, where I remember being appalled by the Trail of Tears, which was the first point I actually learned we didn't always wear a perfectly white hat.
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, until age 16, history in school meant "Here's what the great men did; amazing, right??" But from 16 on? We were sent to research the times and make decisions as if there, e.g., if you were to found a colony where would you do it to make it as viable as possible? Consider available labor, crops, climate, defensible position, how you'll attract new members, etc. Or: If you were advising Wilson in 1914, what would you tell him to do about the war? Or: If you were a lawyer arguing against Dred Scott's freedom, how would you do it? It was a pretty great two-year-long exercise in discovering how contingent everything was, and is. In 1988.
I dunno, that miiiight be the main problem these idiots have -- they can't abide contingency. But, like, ever was it thus, man, so how have you not figured out how to fucking deal?
See also any conservative discussion about Prison Reform. "I wish I could just watch tv and lift weights all day..."
ReplyDeleteI would like to plunge this comment with a plumbers helper untilit can glow feely and gently like the Don.
ReplyDeleteThe Don? Figures a liberal like you wants a Communist river here.
ReplyDeleteThe PC gestapo is forcing him to listen to uncomfortable opinions. In related news, Orwell's ghost says "Dude, what the fuckity fuck!"
ReplyDeleteFirst they came for the Holocaust deniers . . .
ReplyDeleteOrwell would rabbit punch 99.9% of the cretins who constantly vomit out bits of 1984 that they picked up from Cliffs notes. You can bet that none of them have been within sniffing distance of books like The History of Mr. Polly.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, not being able to scream the n-word in a crowded class room and facts on placement tests are the final sign that The Libs will be strapping rat cages to brave patriots' faces any minute now. Ooo. Arrgh. Just you wait...
"They got the same thing the livestock got, whut's the big deal?" is actually a very old pro-slavery argument.
ReplyDelete[Applause]
ReplyDeleteI'd require familiarity with at least one other work that is not Animal Farm. I suspect the average wingnut would choke a few pages into Why I Write.
ReplyDeleteAre you implying that having a rat gnaw through a prisoners face is bad? Because hypothetically a person as awful as me might want to debate that. You fascist.
ReplyDeleteHey... every conservative knows that "Animal Farm" was a defense of confined animal feeding operations which never need burdensome regulations because actors in a truly free market would, in the spirit of rational self interest, NEVER befoul their own water tables.
ReplyDeleteIn case Roy hasn't yet seen this, Charlie Pierce gives a shoutout. "He always brings the finest vintage product and the best new recipes. "
ReplyDeletehttp://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35647/college-board-ap-history-revisions/
If you want to picture the future, imagine a rat not gnawing through a prisoner's face, forever.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know it was an old one. An old nasty justification I'd read (and that persists today in various forms) is that black people feel less pain and have other physical/mental differences that make the institution of slavery not so bad for them.
ReplyDeleteHell, look at all the defenders -- even the liberal Matthew Yglesias! -- of sweatshop conditions in Southeast Asia and other impoverished places.
ReplyDeleteThis statement is phenomenally disingenuous.[...] "Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians."
ReplyDeleteIOW, engineered disingenuousness engenders ingenues' interest in the ingenious indigenous.
I'm not subscribing to the Wall Street Journal, but what exactly does he think is being Memory-Holed?
ReplyDeleteThe reality that white conquerors and slave owners in past centuries only wanted to give the Native American and African peoples equal access to the good things in life, of course.
ReplyDelete"I want my child as filled with mis- and mal-information as possible."
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of something like that just this morning while I was reading the latest sludge...er... op-ed by Thomas Sowell in our local rag. His piece, entitled "Iraq Was Ours To Lose" compares the bleatings of conservatives in the Fifties demanding to know "Who Lost China" (hint: he grudgingly admits that OK, China was never ours to lose) to present day Iraq, which was progressing nicely until the Kenyan Anticolonialist Obongo prematurely withdrew American troops and allowed all the sectarian violence in that previously promising fledgling democracy. Sowell is one of a squadron of wingnut hacks busily rewriting the history of The Surge(tm)" as an unmitigated success, instead of the Band-Aid-on Cancer that temporarily quieted violence in the Sunni controlled areas with hundreds of millions in payoffs to tribal leaders and 25000 troops sitting on their necks that it really was. It makes me wish that Roy would occasionally go after some of the more prominent winger opinion mongers like Sowell, Krauthammer, Gerson, etc as well as the D-League drones at "The American Thinker" and NRO Online.
Including North America!
ReplyDeleteBut remember, "Black people don't suffer pain the way whites do" is a positive stereotype! It's praising their strength and natural endurance!
ReplyDeleteSo just hush and accept it to acknowledge it by ignoring it, per your own advice.
People were objecting to it at the time -- the Quakers in Colonial America, Rev. de las Casas in the Spanish Empire, to pick two famous examples. The later activists are more famous, but they were not the first by any means.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe how much material my daughter covered in her AP classes at The High School For The Very, Very Studious.
ReplyDeleteConservatives probably took one look at the AP courses their kids are not taking at Stigmata High and turned an even whiter shale of pale. The only way to ensure an equal playing ground for their kids is to make everyone as ignorant as them.
"We have always been at war with Wikipedia."
ReplyDelete"Well, no wonder Washington didn't want to free his slaves. Where else would he have gotten his spare teeth?"
ReplyDeleteAnd don't we all know nice and big and white "those" teeth are?
How is Conservapedia doing these days?
ReplyDeleteYou Know You're A Slaveholder When: you eat better than your slaves, but you use their teeth to do it.
ReplyDeleteThat's why Larry Niven is so fixated on organlegging! He's upset that there's no legal way for rich people like the Heir of Teapot Dome to get their replacement parts in this soft modern era.
ReplyDelete(PS: Henrietta Lacks would like a word.)
ReplyDeleteOr the Road to Wigan Pier, or hell, even Shooting an Elephant.
ReplyDeleteBut it's a positive stereotype, like being "more athletic" or "more musical" or "having bigger endowments" than white men, so it's good!
ReplyDeleteAlso the former patients of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study.
ReplyDeleteHe's upset that there's no legal way for rich people like the Heir of Teapot Dome himself to get their replacement parts in this soft modern era.
ReplyDeleteNiven has family money, and the depressingly usual conservative ideals that accompany it.
He has a lot of gall, the Memory Hole is central to conservatism, from "North America really wasn't so populous in 1491" to "black people were better off under slavery" to "the War of Northern Aggression" all the way to "Democrats are the real racists" and "Reagan's 'Morning in America'" and "Bush 43 was a better president than Obama". EVERYTHING they believe is a lie. They sweep history under the rug, but then something happens- a slave shackle is unearthed in a street excavation. An inventory listing human beings as property along with the cattle and spoons comes to light in a dusty library. Orwell got nothing on Henninger and his ilk.
ReplyDeleteBut their critiques are of the institution of slavery within their own political situations (which I did mentioned originate with slavery itself among European colonial powers) not critiques of the political sins of the United States across subaltern groups and the hypocritical ways that the United States in particular narrates its own political history. How could they be?
ReplyDeleteIt's gone downhill since they deleted the "Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus" page.
ReplyDeleteI read it as a correlation-causality kind thing. He's not denying they developed the belief in white superiority and subjugated the dark people, he's just saying there's no proof the two are related. Like maybe believing in white superiority was a leisure activity.
ReplyDeleteYou mean today's kids aren't learning about Saint Jackson and the Trail of Tickles? The Five Fifths Compromise? The Middle Cruise? What has happened to our education?!
ReplyDeleteYeah, just like Obama, he had an anti-colonial worldview, or so I have read in D'nish D'Souza's "The Roots of Orwell's Rage".
ReplyDeleteIt's not that Vermont is particularly bad; it's just that New England's fetish for local control means there's nearly as many school board members as students. (I exaggerate slightly; New Hampshire has somewhere between 190 and 210 school districts, some of which have fewer than 100 students.) Getting elected to the school board is easy. Back in '94-'95, an evangelical church in Merrimack, NH decided to take over the school board, including running a stealth candidate that disclaimed any political platform and turned up on stage months later at the Christian Coalition's annual conference. Jesus' hand-picked school board was notably unsuccessful beyond scrubbing homosexuality from the curriculum, not renewing the contract of the single out lesbian teacher, and severing ties with Planned Parenthood, which basically meant one less guest speaker for the health ed class.
ReplyDeleteTurnout jumped by a factor of five for the next school board election, and the fundies were all dumped on their ears. Turns out that people really dislike being lied to.
The crazy thing about this lie is that it presupposed that they would have had neither food not roofs in Africa. Meanwhile, as slaves, they were forced to grow foodstuffs and build houses for their masters.
ReplyDeleteIt would be more accurate to state it as: Many Europeans found that their belief in white superiority came in handy when justifying their subjugations...
ReplyDeleteWell, if you are limiting your definition of "critiquing the system and its founding myths" to "critiquing the post-1782 American system and myths", then of course. But it sounded as though you were saying that the idea of critiquing the founding myths of what would eventually become the modern United States itself was original to post-1782 Americans, and it wasn't.
ReplyDeleteAh, but he is the Heir of Teapot Dome. His moneyed ancestor was a perpetrator of it.
ReplyDeleteOr even more pertinently, Homage to Catalonia, which came about as a result of Orwell going to Spain to fight against fascism.
ReplyDelete(Now, being an even-handed lefty, I must point out that much of the quality of that book is because Orwell is more than willing to criticize authoritarianism on the left... but that doesn't take away from the fact that Orwell really, really did not like Franco and his fascists. Unlike certain others, *cough*, Buckley)
I've watched the original Macintosh commercial more than once.
ReplyDeleteThe true test of trolling should be creating a mock history book like this, and getting Regnery to publish it.
ReplyDeleteIt shouldn't be impossible, given the existence of "My Parents Open Carry"...
http://www.amazon.com/Parents-Open-Carry-Brian-Jeffs/dp/1618081012
Even more ironic then that they are trying to deny the poor even those measly comforts these days.
ReplyDeleteOne thing's for sure; they'll never have bullshit detectors.
ReplyDeleteVocational training.
ReplyDeleteBut so what? They weren't inventing any of their critiques, just adapting the pre-Revolutionary dialogue to changing political scenarios. All you've done is at best state a tautology, and at worst erase a lot of earlier critics engaged in the fight against oppression. There were labour battles and women's rights debates going on across Europe and therefore into the Americas during the 1600s, and the lines got very messy as different groups broke politically along religious and class lines, but they existed. Communications technology was at a much more primitive level than it would be a hundred years later, but it existed.
ReplyDeleteThe Middle Cruise?
ReplyDeleteNicely done.
And you could "write" it merely by cutting-and-pasting comments from NRO and WND. Easy money!!!
ReplyDeleteD'oh! I guess I gave up on his biography too early.
ReplyDeleteI was expecting a Volga reference, but I'm glad you decided to skip the Volgarity.
ReplyDeleteA brief public service announcement.
ReplyDeleteR.I.P. Ornette Coleman.
https://youtu.be/HjVURhB4bsE
It somehow makes all his "eat your bootstraps/sell your kidneys!" and moral superiority of the wealthy white male rhetoric even more ironic, than if he were descended from a more above-board robber baron.
ReplyDeleteSELF AWARENESS? WE NO HAZ IT
Oh THAT was precious. Yglesias said it was perfectly appropriate for poorer countries to have lower safety standards because "in a free society it's good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum." Of course he is pretending that the poor are choosing high-risk work because it pays better instead of applying his theory to the real world where factory work is low-paid and taken out of need, not choice. These were garment workers, not firemen.
ReplyDeleteBangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.
The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that's primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. And in a free society it's good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html
I guess by his standards a slave should be grateful for room and board because he is poor and desperate. He is simply making a choice on the risk-reward spectrum. He risks bodily harm in exchange for food and the chance to keep living but that's entirely appropriate because he is so much poorer than the slave owner.
Drawing a line between being a slave and being a garment worker in Southeast Asia seems arbitrary. In a free marketplace why shouldn't you be able to sell your freedom? You are not a slave, you are a producer, an entrepreneur, a small businessman. You are finally worth something to the rich because you are commoditized.
I want to spoon-feed this comment to Jeff Foxworthy.
ReplyDeleteI recall that Mitt had something to say about people who feel entitled to food and a roof over their heads.
ReplyDeleteThey're dropping like flies today. The deaths of actor Christopher Lee and wrestler Dusty Rhodes were in today's news too.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, that would give me the chance to set up the joke better by explaining that on Earth 2 the 'Fifths' Compromise refers to how much of a vote black people got, instead of how many representatives their owners did.
ReplyDeleteHuh, I was not aware that sweatshop jobs paid a premium.
ReplyDeleteit's just that New England's fetish for local control means there's nearly as many school board members as students. (I exaggerate slightly; New Hampshire has somewhere between 190 and 210 school districts, some of which have fewer than 100 students.)
ReplyDeleteWe actually have a complete school district for a single elementary school with only 20 students. Add up all the board members and administrators and you've already outnumbered the students.
Sadly, the school system is viewed by many as a make-work project for adults instead of something we collectively build and fund to educate our children.
You might think that sewing should not be life-threatening but that's just your Western paternalism.
ReplyDeleteDuring town budget meetings this year, the school supervisory union (kind of an umbrella administrative layer that goes on top of the school-board admin layers, which themselves sit atop the school admin layers) gave a presentation on education spending and this year's budget. Imagine my surprise when one of the presenters declared that the schools fully expect that "one-third of students will go on to college, another third will find local employment, and one-third will go directly onto welfare."
ReplyDeleteNothing like setting high expectations.
It's all relative! Pennies an hour is a premium compared to nothing at all an hour...
ReplyDeleteNo, not Dirty Dusty Rhodes, too!
ReplyDeleteNo, he she was referring to
ReplyDeleteAnd yet he will not understand, when the ghosts of the Triangle Fire haul him off in a tumbril to Hell's guillotine -- "I was a good liberal, in favour of liberty and justice for all! I always voted Democrat! What did I do wrong?"
ReplyDeleteMy point is that these are the critics of the US as a political entity. Of course they are participating in larger movements, especially ones in Great Britain and France with which they share similar print cultures that facilitate the free flow of ideas. But they are inventing their critiques, absolutely. They might draw on thinkers before them in some cases, but in others they ground their thinking in different religious traditions and historically situated beliefs. They invent methods and rhetoric on their own and tailor their messages to their own subjectivities and communities of speakers.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to go to the 17th century there are debates in Europe about slavery and women's rights, about labor and religion, but there are very few that a) originate in the Americas, and b) are about what would one day become the United States. The colonial US at that time is a back water that produces vanishingly little in terms of print culture. Of course Anne Bradstreet's poetry will be published in England as an example of a woman genius "lately sprung up in America" but it remains authorized by its male publishers and is viewed as a statement on women's rights more or less anachronistically. Even slavery debates focus primarily on the Caribbean at that point.
But the topic was an American conception of US history. Historically, the majority of the people that originate a radical critique of the United States that is seen as part of the genealogy here are fervent protestant believers in the nascent reform movements of the early 19th century. They are participating in larger movements of varying degrees of intentionality (though the women's rights in the 19C US are eventually divorced from much of the ideological grounding of the European debate, they do owe a debt to the Godwinian conception of women as rights bearing citizens). How is it a tautology, unless all observations that are not universal in scope are tautological? How does attending to the ways that different communities imagine their oppression and their freedom erase others?
They should get together with Ms. Fitzgibbons of Frenship, TX, who called all black people uneducated dropouts before saying that of course she respected all her black students and colleagues.
ReplyDeleteAfter the outcry, and after she took down her FB poast post boasting of being a brave truthteller just telling it like it is...
"Arbeit Macht Svelte"
ReplyDeleteWell, literally, it is revisionist, but revising things based on new information and new understanding shouldn't be viewed negatively.
ReplyDeleteAre you seriously saying that the abolition arguments in England weren't about the American colonies? Do you really think that there was this conversational chasm, that it just stopped dead in 1776 and an entirely different one started in 1782? If you think that, there's no point in having a conversation with you at all. I've seen newspapers from the early 1600s, there were massive amounts of political literature produced at the time, even if comparatively little of it has survived, there were movements like the Diggers in England and there was a reason that the Regicides went to ground in Connecticut. You can't separate the dialogues ongoing in Europe about slavery, or labour, or religion, or gender, or even the idea of colonialism from those taking place in the Americas, because they were all intertwined, they were all about each other. It's as ridiculous as trying to talk about the American Revolution without taking into account the centuries of political rivalry between France, England and Spain, and how those involved the Low Countries.
ReplyDeleteI've seen all of those things, too. You are moving the timeline back. I am not quibbling with the international nature of much of this. I am talking about the political critiques of the United States that originate in the reform movements in the 19th century. I cannot emphasize that enough. They are their own social formation even if they are connected to other historical movements. If we are talking about the earliest US-based critiques of US political institutions, that's what we are talking about. Women's rights, in particular, in the US come out of those religious movements. Worker's rights movements in the US will change after the large wave of post-1848 German immigrants, but many of them are evangelical Lutherans. Abolition's status as an international movement does not contradict my original point that evangelical protestants were some of the earliest critics of the US political situation. Indeed, I commented earlier that I was explicitly including the international abolitionist movement. But they become politically important in the US after the Second Great Awakening, it is only then that many Northern states abolish slavery.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I cannot emphasize enough that I am not disagreeing that they are embedded in international movements. I have written that. But in order for there to be a domestic critique of the US state, there must be a US state, history continues after 1782 and much of what becomes gender rights, workers rights, and rights for racial minorities in the US grows out of those movements and the way they innovate over their antecessors. It's one of the reasons that the contemporary US treats those rights differently than the UK or France.
A propagandist doesn't give two shits about the material. Their only goal is winning.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, "revisionist" has gotten the rightwing Wurlitzer treatment so that many (most?) now view it as a pejorative. It's what they did to the word "liberal" when Reagan became president.
ReplyDelete"Market capitalism doesn't "influence," libtards -- it heals, it soothes, it liberates!"
ReplyDeleteIt coats, soothes, protects!
I hope for the same dumping here, but the wingers aren't up for re-election yet. All we're doing by getting the nice lady elected is holding our ground and denying them the super majority they need to go really nuts.
ReplyDeleteNot only that, but those bewigged anticolonial agitators George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and their hippie friends. For a true conservative outlook you need to go back to George III. As for pro-colonial Gunga Dinesh D'Souza, you're forcing me to pimp myself again.
ReplyDeleteThe American Dream.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/9py4aMK3aIU
They assume everyone else is just like themselves, and won't have read the books either.
ReplyDelete"Gin and tonic and a bowl of that blindly fatuous smugness, please, Mabel."
ReplyDeleteI dunno, that miiiight be the main problem these idiots have -- they
ReplyDeletecan't abide contingency. But, like, ever was it thus, man, so how have
you not figured out how to fucking deal?
I'll just leave this here.
Of course they had no roofs. That's why they spent all night outdoors in drumming circles, prompting the British civil servants to remark, "The natives are restless." Have I mentioned that Allen West claims slavery was a liberal plot to create a pathological "culture of dependency" among its victims, just like welfare?
ReplyDeleteThe Vagina Monologues Stole Their Lunch Money!
ReplyDeleteNot the American Dream! No.
ReplyDeleteIt's a cookbook!
ReplyDeleteMy brother teaches in this district, and both of his daughters go to school there. In fact, the oldest was one of the students who walked out at Bear Creek. We were all proud of her, even my usually anti-union dad.
ReplyDeleteYglesias is very smart, but a big piece of him will always be stuck in econ 101 marveling at how perfect markets are.
ReplyDeleteAnd inevitably: "Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.
ReplyDeleteIf concerned conservatives and their historians had a leg to stand on, they would have no problem working with this framework. Why pretend to give such a broad swath of subject matter over to the lefties? I say "pretend" because the Right does talk about "gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities," as well as "larger conceptions of American national identity." You could argue that they are defined by how they inevitably (see Henninger above) come back to their identity politics and correctness. When they're PC they just think of it as being tough lil' Davy facing down Lib Goliath (who is, like, tireless, huge and scary but also somehow feminized and enervated).
If they're right, they could win even on the identity battlefield. The left didn't invent identity, class, etc. By all means, let's hear how these things really work.
I liked Burmese Days, if for nothing else than it shows Orwell in his less famous days and for how crappy colonialism could be for the colonizers, let alone the colonized.
ReplyDeleteIIRC, Washington was the only one of the slave-holding presidents to free his slaves. Granted, this was after his death, but still.
ReplyDeleteSo Henniger writes in the fucking WALL STREET JOURNAL that debate is being stifled because his views can't be aired?
ReplyDeleteMaybe he ought to write for a non-subscription organ. Just sayin'
Not to mention that the book itself was an allegory on the postwar world as a whole and that Winston was a stand-in for intellectuals, not for Joe Sixpack, whom Orwell describes as being pacified by crappy entertainment on the TV.
ReplyDeleteThis one is particularly choice, because at the very same time they're claiming victimhood for being to stifled to contest the specious notion that our Founding Fathers believed in white superiority, they are also claiming white superiority themselves.
ReplyDelete"Tax cuts create revenue."
ReplyDelete"Trees cause pollution" (Thank Reagan for that little gem.)
We could go on and on with this.
Interesting. http://home.nas.com/lopresti/ps.htm
ReplyDeletePersonally, I hate that conservatives sincerely feel like they OWN Orwell's 1984. I hate to hear them casually refer to it as though it validates their worldview.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the working class rural South. It's oppressive as hell, conformity of thought is rigorously enforced and anything resembling freethinking is scarce. I remember the first time I read 1984 as a young person, and it really made an impression on me. The authoritarian system described in that book seemed awfully familiar. It helped me to realize that this isolated society I grew up in wasn't the whole world, and rejecting that was okay.
Even today, so many years later, I hear Rightwingers bring up Orwell and 1984 as though doing so is the ultimate trump card against liberalism. Even people who have never read the book do this, and I find it disgusting.
You must read the comments to that link, you won't be sorry.
ReplyDeleteBrilliant!
ReplyDeleteOrnette was a true original. I've lost count of how many times I've read about some musician doing new things, then been disappointed to hear something very familiar (which is fine). Not Ornette. When I tell you he's something special, you can bank on it, like him or not. And it's still true, maybe because he inspired people, but not to mimic him.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, these same conservatives don't voluntarily accept a lifestyle of poverty. Strange!
ReplyDeleteI think Conservatives understood the underlying point of 1984 - you can rewrite the past, and you can use torture to break people. They are frustrated in their inability to perform the latter, but they work on the former on a daily basis...
ReplyDeleteContext really matters, something the right wing, generally, and particularly in this country, assiduously avoids, because black-and-white is soooo much easier.
ReplyDeleteWhen the righty-tighty-whiteys use the word "revisionist" they inevitably couch it in terms that make it seem like it's the work of the Politburo's Sub-Committee on the Glorious History of the Motherland, while for the rest of us, it's more like, "neat, found something new and interesting."
And, these days, because that new something is often unearthed from the detritus of the official record, and doesn't put Old Glory in a good light, the new somethings are seen as antithetical to American exceptionalism, which is as rigid a principle as any the Politburo could come up with, which then inclines the right wing to slide into the pot of aberrant psychology and reverse-double-whammy projection and authoritarian jibber-jabber, ala Henninger.
I guess you could argue that slavery should not be considered a form of subjugation, which is certainly an argument that would do Orwell proud.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3loy0EG4uQ
ReplyDeleteMartha Washington, however, refused to follow her husband's example.
ReplyDeleteIt is, after all, a feature of the South to keep traditions alive.
And in a very nice, neoliberal way, Yglesias is saying, "oh, and as well we all know, life is cheap to the Asians."
ReplyDeleteFrom Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.
ReplyDeleteI am desperately curious to know how Henninger imagines people could possibly argue against this.
It doesn't say "All" or "Most" Europeans believed in white superiority, so you can't argue against it by bringing up the Europeans who didn't believe in white superiority.
You can't argue that white superiority wasn't used as a rationale for slavery, because it very explicitly was; you can find people arguing that slavery is the best way for superior whites to bestow the gifts of civilization on the lesser races.
The same goes for Native Americans; the massacres and relocations were, I believe, justified at least partially on the basis of their inferiority to white people.
The thing about that paragraph is that it doesn't claim that white supremacist subjugation of blacks and American Indians was the rule, or make any claims about how it happened, simply that it was an important part of history.
I suppose you could argue that slavery and massacres aren't a form of subjugation.
Which would certainly do Orwell proud.
If America is to be exceptional, you can't very well point out all the unexceptional things in it's history or to put it another way, SHUT UP THAT'S WHY!
ReplyDeleteThis argument has been been advanced by the free-marketeers, particularly as regards the prevailing dime-an-hour laborer's wage in Cambodia. Basically, "it's all good--they're doing better than they did as garbage-pickers." (That latter remark is a quote, but I can't remember the source. I've probably blocked it out as a basic defense of mental health technique.)
ReplyDeleteBuncha moochers.
ReplyDeletePeople pay good money to lose that kind of weight.
ReplyDeleteMichael Parenti makes just this point about some of Madison's letters on his farming techniques. In one, he proudly offers, approximately, "each slave creates $193 in wealth for the farm per annum, while my cost in supporting each slave is $13. A remarkable economy."
ReplyDeleteParenti then says Madison got it completely ass-backwards--the slaves were supporting him. It's the same general misapprehension that persists right through to today regarding the worker/owner relationship.
Hey, c'mon, West is the whitest guy I know.
ReplyDeleteThey might have them, but they'd have to pull the batteries out pretty quick to stop the incessant noise.
ReplyDeleteAh, `tis meta-1984.
ReplyDeleteNo matter how I frame it, my students get this backwards with peasants all the time: the lords were supporting the serfs, just like they wrote they were.
ReplyDeleteEven that doesn't explain another trend--FIRE sector profits as a percentage of all corporate profits, which in a recent year topped 40%. Fifty years ago, that percentage was about 4-5%.
ReplyDeleteM'self, I think that's one big reason why the government continues to prop them up. Now that manufacturing has been drawn-and-quartered, to have finance profits return to pre-Reagan levels would prove, indelibly, how badly the real economy has been hollowed out in the last couple of generations.
It already exists (published by Regnery): http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-American-History/dp/0895260476
ReplyDeleteYglesias is very smart
ReplyDelete[citation needed]