Dalton Trumbo at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

There’s a new poll about America’s reading habits that Caleb Crain eviscerates here. One question on the survey, however, is so stupid that it calls out for greater sarcasm:

It is 3 AM and your telephone rings. The next president can’t sleep and is calling you for a book recommendation. Other than the Bible, what book would you suggest?

Actually, I was a bit hasty here. The answers to this question are even worse than the question itself:

Among the most frequent responses were books on history, from the Federalist Papers to a more recent look at American history found in David McCullough’s 1776. Many also suggested politically themed books - including those by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Books by politicians such as Ron Paul, Barack Obama, and Al Gore - as well as books by both Bill and Hillary Clinton - which were also frequent mentions. So were suggestions to read anything by Ayn Rand.

Lengthy classics such as War and Peace and the Lord of the Rings also made the list, while others were more inclined to suggest more recent fiction by such authors as Tom Clancy, James Patterson, John Grisham and Stephen King.

Gee, wouldn’t you hope the next President was familiar with the Federalist Papers before they became President? [Tell me again which one of the remaining presidential candidates used to teach constitutional law.] And I wonder what what kind of people suggested Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Perhaps they think John McCain needs a lesson in remedial conservatism? Presumably the people most likely to mention Barack Obama’s books are Obama supporters. Why would Obama need to read a book he wrote? And don’t even get me started on Ayn Rand.

If you pinned me down to answering this jackass question, I think my choice would be Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo since the first order of business the next President should have is to end the war in Iraq and they should be brutally reminded why they need to do it as soon as possible.

Was George McGovern a “condescending ass?”

Surprisingly, I haven’t exactly been riveted by the discussion of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland over at TPM Cafe. It’s a fantastic book, but everyone has been so kind to it that the discussion hasn’t told me anything I didn’t already know. However, Todd Gitlin did pick up on a line from Perlstein’s first post that bothered me too when I first read it. Here’s Perlstein:

The liberals and leftists I write about were condescending asses. That’s one of the main points of the book!

Jerry Rubin. ["Kill your parents. And I mean that quite literally."] Absolutely. But Gitlin, a New Leftist himself, makes the excellent point that:

This wasn’t the whole of either liberalism or New Leftism.

Gitlin’s post covers the rest of the New Left, but what about the politicians? Was Bobby Kennedy a condescending ass? Was George McGovern a condescending ass? Perlstein convinced me that McGovern was really mean to Tom Eagleton, but does that make him a “condescending ass?” I don’t think so.

That said, at least one of his prominent supporters was:

I couldn’t even get through this whole clip it was so painful, but you can’t blame George McGovern for what Shirley MacLaine said. Dennis Kucinich maybe, but George McGovern no.

“Manhatta” (1921).

I have no idea how I’d use this in class, but it’s just beautiful:

Social Security.

As an added bonus, you can also discuss why FDR is sitting down.

The people of Florida and Michigan can still vote, you know.

Bad comparison:

Striking a defiant tone, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday ratcheted up her argument that the Democratic Party should count the delegates from Florida and Michigan as it prepares to choose a presidential nominee.

She put her case in the context of the nation’s historic struggle for civil rights and voting rights. Invoking literacy tests, poll taxes and violence, she said that extending the voting franchise was a “core mission of the Democratic Party.” And she warned of both a moral cost and a political cost to the party if it does not do so, saying the Republicans would win these two crucial battleground states.

The people of Florida and Michigan have the franchise, it’s just their votes in the primary that are being threatened. If voting in primaries were really supposed to be that (small d) democratic, there shouldn’t be any Superdelegates, many of whom aren’t elected by any voters at all. Somehow, I don’t see her making that argument this year.

Rick Perlstein belongs in Boulder.

Like every other blogger I tend read regularly, I’m reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland right now. Yes, it’s as good as everyone says. It reminds me of one of those gigantic David Halberstam books my Dad used to read, but unlike Halberstam (with the possible exception of the Best and the Brightest) this one has a very clearly-defined argument: Nixon is the forefather of our modern politics of divisions. Granted, I’m not quite at the end yet, but what’s funny to me is that Perlstein doesn’t even have to mention the present to make the argument.

The example of this phenomenon that struck me the most was the way conservatives back then discussed universities. Here are just a couple of examples where I folded the corner of the page down for future reference:

“And there is no better illustration of that than what has been perpetuated at the University of California at Berkeley, where a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame to a great university.”
The mess began, Reagan explained, “when so-called ‘free-speech advocates,’ who in truth have no appreciation of freedom, were allowed to assault and humiliate the symbol of authority, a policeman in uniform, and that was the moment when the ringleaders should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off campus–personally [p. 83].”

And here’s the hero of the story, Nixon:

“Freedom–intellectual freedom–is in danger in America…Violence–physical violence, physical intimidation–is seemingly on its way to becoming an accepted, or, at all events, a normal and not to be avoided element in the clash of opinion within university confines…The process is altogether familiar to those of us who would survey the wreckage of history: assault and counterassault, one extreme leading to the opposite extreme, the voices of reason and calm discredited [p. 364].”

Unlike say, the folks at Sadly No!, I don’t have the patience to trace the same kind of argument showing up in the writings of David Horowitz. However, I am reminded of a story from the Wall Street Journal I read a while back. The University of Colorado at Boulder has a position opening for the study of conservative thought:

Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson surveys this landscape with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. “We should also talk about intellectual diversity,” he says. So over the next year, Mr. Peterson plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for what is thought to be the nation’s first Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.

KC Johnson at Cliopatria, reasonable guy that he is, notes that:

Few (outside the academy, anyway) would deny that a Tier One research university should have at least one person on staff who specializes in understanding conservative thought or the history or implementation of conservative policy options.

I certainly don’t dispute that, but if you read the Chancellor in the quote above it’s quite clear that this chair in the study of conservative thought is supposed to be held by someone who agrees with that line of thinking. It’s affirmative action for conservatives. If you ask me, they’d do much better hiring Rick Perlstein. Reading Nixonland, it’s hard not to think that he understands modern conservative ideology better than conservatives do.

Ball and Chain.

I was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last week, and walked into a theater showing this clip of Janis Joplin:

Apart from the obvious fact that that woman could really sing, I love the way the filmmakers keep cutting to her legs.

Contemporary American history.

Just remember, this clip is funny because it’s not true and it’s not family-friendly either:

PS One of the many things I love about the movie “Back to School” is that it was filmed at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin - Madison. If you know the campus, you can actually see them go to great lengths to block out all the ugly buildings throughout the film, particularly the one that houses the history department.

It’s class warfare I tell you!

I am still amazed that the Wall Street Journal of all places has hired my favorite writer (or perhaps I should say historian) as a columnist. Today, he gives us a history lesson based on Steve Greenhouse’s new book, The Big Squeeze (which I reviewed very favorably here):

Median “nonelderly” household income, we find, fell consistently through the first half of this decade, despite the solid economic growth enjoyed by the country as a whole.

Some nonmedian folks did just fine, of course: The top 20% of households earned more, after taxes, than the rest of the country combined in 2005, while the topmost 1% of the population took home more than the bottom 40%. The top-earning hedge fund manager of 2007, in fact, made about as much last year in nominal dollars ($3.7 billion) as J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, was worth in the mid-1970s.

Real hourly wages for most workers, on the other hand, have risen only 1% since 1979, even as those workers’ productivity has increased by 60%. What’s more, American workers now clock more hours per year than their counterparts in virtually every other advanced economy, even Japan. And unless you haven’t read a newspaper for 15 years, you already know what’s happened to workers’ health insurance and pension plans.

Who’d have thunk it? Class warfare on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

I can’t wait to see what happens when Frank goes directly after Wall Street.

What happened to chicken.

I can’t say I recommend this essay in the New Yorker. Food is not too cheap or too expensive. It’s too cheap in America and too expensive in the developing world and those two conditions are directly related. Nevertheless, the essay does include a very good explanation of why the chicken you buy in the supermarket these isn’t what it used to be:

Roberts has a powerful passage on industrial chicken, showing how its vile flesh is a direct consequence of its status as economic commodity. In the nineteen-seventies, it took ten weeks to raise a broiler; now it takes forty days in a dark and crowded shed, because farmers are under constant pressure to cut costs and increase productivity. Every cook knows that chicken breast is no longer what it once was—it’s now remarkably flabby and yielding. Roberts reveals that poultry experts have a term for this: P.S.E., or “pale, soft, exudative” meat. Today’s birds, Roberts shows, are bred to be top-heavy, in order to satisfy consumers’ desire for “healthy” white meat at affordable prices. In these Sumo-breasted monsters, a vast volume of lactic acid is released upon death, damaging the proteins—hence the crumbly meat. Poultry firms deal with P.S.E. after the fact, pumping the flaccid breast with salts and phosphates to keep it artificially juicier. What they don’t do is try particularly hard to prevent P.S.E. They can’t afford to. The average U.S. consumer eats eighty-seven pounds of chicken a year—twice as much as in 1980—but this generates a profit of only two cents per pound for the farmer.

Roberts is Paul Roberts, and I’m buying his book The End of Food on the basis of that passage alone. I’ve previously written about problems with chicken at Wal-Mart. It’ll be nice to be able to explain them in better detail.