I guess no one tugged the straps and said “That ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
Well, here we’ve come to the end of July, though for central Alabama we’re still a long way away from the worst of summer. I had an unusually high amount of audiobooks this month, and my fiction & nonfiction are now at a dead heat. My nonfiction reading was largely American Revolution related. I did pick up Tocqueville, but I was handling Walter Isaacs’ girthy biography of Ben Franklin at the same time. Regarding challenges, it was….not a good month, since the only challenge I made progress in was The Great Reread, revisiting Crunchy Cons.
The Harmony Club Little Free Library:
Some years ago an enterprising city councilman had the idea to drop former newspaper boxes across town for people to decorate and turn into Little Free Libraries. One sat outside The Harmony Club, which I’ve written about prior, and even after its savior DJ died and THC was sold, his former business partner kept tending to the LFL. Now said partner is moving to Atlanta, leaving me as the LFL’s unofficial custodian. It’s not an official LFL, in that no one pays to have it listed on a map of LFLs, but it’s there and gets…….some traffic. I’ve been doing monthly check-ins in the last few months to get ready for this new responsibility, but now it’s more serious. I may start spotlighting some of the box’s current residents in these monthly posts. It’s an interesting anniversary of sorts: two years ago yesterday was the last time we ever gathered at the Sidewalk, and now THC’s steward is moving on. The artwork on the box is a combination of the former steward and a local artist who used to leave bricolage near the the Harmony Club for DJ to admire.
America at 250?
As American readers may know, next year is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I’ve been planning for what I might do to honor the occasion, seeing as I wasn’t here for the 200th and probably won’t be here for the 300th. I was thinking of a multi-track series that would feature a course of reading across American history, a series of biographies, and a series of books touching on different elements of American culture, or different genres that have grown up from American roots, like bluegrass and jazz. My history reading this month has made me wonder if it wouldn’t be more appropriate to start that now, building up to the 250th across a year and retroactively including this month’s reading in that celebration.
The Unreviewed: Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson. Not sure why I haven’t reviewed this one yet. Distractions, I suppose. Will try to remedy that! The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, audible version. I enjoyed this, though not as much as Kenneth Branagth’s Magician’s Nephew.
New Acquisitions: Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frank (Gift) Evelyn Waugh title. (I forget, and it’s in my car. Definitely not Brideshead.) (Gift) Close Encounters with the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg. Will probably save this for a SF-focused month.
Coming up in August: August 20th is Dr. Ron Paul’s 90th birthday; Paul is the godfather of the American libertarian movement, and universally loved among libertarians despite our penchant for in-fighting. I played with the idea of going to his birthday BBQ (Tom Woods’ supporters received early invites), but tickets were a bit pricey, even considering the guest list. Plus, if I’m going to travel during the summer, it’s not going to be to a place that’s just as hot as Alabama. Anyhoo, I picked up a couple of his books with the intention of featuring them the week of the 20th.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, 1993. This is the one where April buys a weird lamp at a thrift store and then she gets teleported to feudal Japan, and the guys have to go after her and they get caught up in some civil war between Grumpy Man and Mitsui, Warrior Princess, a war that can only be remedied if Mitsui, Warrior Princess, marries Grumpy Man’s son Kenshin, who – inconveniently – was teleported into 1990s NYC along with his father’s honor guard because time travel only works if you match the number of people going and coming exactly. I have conflicted feelings about this one: it’s…silly, but Secret of the Ooze was downright preposterous, especially with Tokka and Razar who would only work in a kids movie. On the other hand, kid-me was a fan of Mitsui.
1776, 1972. A rewatch for me, an introduction for the ladyfriend. Excellent, excellent, excellent. I’d forgotten how great a movie it is, between the impassioned debates, casting, acting, and music. It’s only aged better the older I get, as I now recognize so much dialogue from the letters of the Founders themselves.
SuperVixens, 1975. A….crime….suspense…..trash movie about a man being chased by Charles Napier. Let’s leave it at that. (Just read Russ Meyer’s wikipedia article, you’ll get idea.)
Tavington: This is madness!! Benjamin Martin: Madness? THIS! IS! AMERICAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
The Patriot, 2000. My lord, I’d forgotten how utterly hatable Jason Isaacs is in this movie. In his first five minutes on film, he’s ordered an innocent man’s house and fields set fire to, ordered a teenager to be hung as a spy, and shot a child. This is a Revolutionary War murder drama in which a farmer who is determined to shield his children from the War sees one threatened with hanging and another one shot, at which point he chooses violence. Glorious, bloody violence. Also, Rene Auberjonis (aka Odo from ST DS9) is a supporting actor in this!
In Bruges, 2008. A hitman accidentally kills a child while on an assignment, and is told to hang out in Belgium until the heat dies down. He is accompanied by Mad Eye Mooney, which is funny because their mutual boss is Ralph Fiennes, aka Voldemort. The beginning of the film is a low-key suspense film with some comedic elements, as Moody enjoys the culture of Bruges but the hitman finds it only tolerable after he meets a local and starts dating her. It turns out that Voldemort sent the hitman to Bruges so he’d have a nice week before someone else knocked him off to avoid any problems with law enforcement and the dead kid.
Rock and Roll High School, 1979. An enthusiast of the Ramones meets them at a concert and invites them to take over her high school. Basically a Ramones musical with the plot being of secondary – perhaps tertiary – importance. I continued my parlor trick of finding Star Trek and Sopranoes links in almost every movie we watch because Del Pay has been in no less than three episodes of 1990s-era Star Trek episodes.
Microcosmos, 1996. French insect documentary with video work that is absolutely AMAZING for the mid-1990s. This is Planet Earth level detail. (This movie was prompted by my cinema buddy’s apartment being literally colonized by bees.)
Twelve Angry Men, 1997. The first time I ever watched TAM was the remake in high school, for creative writing or speech class (same teacher, same classroom). Watching this thirty years later was a…wholly different inexperience, in part because I knew the story and largely because I knew so many actors.
“Hey! That’s Tony Soprano! hey! That’s Gil Grissom! Hey! That’s Tony Danza! Hey! That’s George C. Marshall! Jack Lemmon! Wait, who ISN’T in this movie?”
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 1954. A musical comedy about some backwoods boy lookin’ for lady-types. Fun!
In the Army Now, 1994. Two slackers (Pauly Shore & Andy Dick) who work in an electronics store are fired for general incompetence, and decide to join the Army Reserves as weekend warriors specializing in water purification. Are they concerned? No, because the last war was like, what, WW2? (Boy, you guys need libertarian friends who will give you lectures on all of DC’s foreign policy misadventures.) Things happen, and soon the “waterboys” soon find themselves not only in a war, but behind enemy lines in a place where only they can do something. I watched this more than a few times as a teenager. There are also aspects I didn’t appreciate as a kid, like the absurdity of Libyan camp guards shooting machine guns during an air raid.
Payday, 1973. Watched this solely because it was filmed in and around my hometown, so my buddy and I were constantly pausing and rewinding to study background details and figure out where shots were being taken. There is a plot about a country-music singer whose life of excess is destroying him and those around him.
Bendersky’s storefront, 1974….and 2022.
Renaissance Man, 1994. Danyn DeVito plays an unemployed ad man who is assigned to work at a military base and teach a small group of boots who are judged being on the verge of flunking out. There’s no curriculum, so after a few halting attempts at finding some way to teach “comprehension”, DeVito stumbles into teaching ….Hamlet! The students include a very young Mark Wahlberg, as well as a minor character from The Sopranoes. (He’s one of Jackie Jr’s friends who gets shot.) While a lot of the film is weak, sense-wise, there’s a lot of humor and heartwarm-y stuff. My favorite part was the Sopranoes character, who is fond of Al Pacino impersonations, reading Henry V as Pacino in Scarface. (He does not do this in the big finale, where for some reason his DI demands he quote some Shakespeare, so he performs the “Band of Brothers” speech.) One impressive feat the film does is slowly humanizing a group of largely obnoxious students – Private Motormouth in general – so that the viewer can actually like them by the end. Ditto for DeVito’s character, who starts off very much like Emilio Estevez in Mighty Ducks but finds his passion.
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, 2019. Jay and Silent Bob have to go to Hollywood to stop Kevin Smith from making another Jay and Silent Bob movie. “What kinda broken down [creeps] still WATCH this stuff, anyway?!”
Me, the viewer: (waves)
Along the way, Jay discovers he’s a dad, and viewers are forced to deal with annoying teenagers. While my attitude during the movie was more toleration than wholescale enjoyment, there were nice parts: like cameos from Matt Damon & Ben Affleck. (Damon’s was the funniest, since he kept doing Bourne references.) There are a lot of inside references, like Kevin Smith’s daughter (playing Jay’s daughter) saying she hates Kevin Smith because he forces his daughter to act in all his movies. The ending is amusing, though.
“How old are these guys, anyway?” “I think they were alive during the ninenties.” “No way! That’s before they built THE INTERNET!”
“Silent Bob says, failure is success training.” “…then why aren’t you the most successful man in the world?”
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, 2001. Watching Reboot made me realize that either (1) I’ve only watched unconnected clips from the original Jay and Silent Bob movie or (2) it’s been so long since I watched the movie I remember nothing about it. In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jay and Silent Bob learn that a movie is being based on them, so they run off to Hollywood to stop it.
“A Jay and Silent Bob movie? Who would watch THAT?” Me: (waves)
Enroute, Jay falls for a young woman and unwittingly joints a diamond-stealing gang as their love-smitten patsy. There are cameos from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and….a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart, not to mention Will Ferrell. (Dante and Randall also appear a few times! On the downside, Jay repeatedly refers to an orangutan as a chimp and still worse, a monkey.
WF: Why are you shooting at me?! Bad Girl Band: Two reasons! One, we’re walking, talkin’, bad-girl cliches! Two, you’re a man!
Out to Sea, 1997. Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon are a couple of old codgers who Walter enlists as “dance hosts” on a cruise ship. Walter’s not in it for a cruise, though, he wants to gamble & try to lure in some old biddie with a lot of money. He winds up falling in love with a youngish woman who (unbeknowst to him) is also a gold-digging con artist. Meanwhile, Lemmon struggles with being a widower in love. Entertaining, and it has Brent Spiner singing.
The Drop. 2014. James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy, madonne! Gandolfini plays the former owner of a bar who was pushed out by some Chechens who use the bar for some gangland things. His nephew Bob (Tom Hardy) tends the bar. One night they’re robbed by a couple of nogoodniks, annnnnd the Chechens want their money back. I’ve always only ever seen Hardy in roles where he’s very self-assured — Shinzon, Bane, Bronson, etc — so seeing him as a mild-mannered barkeep was fascinating. Continue to be impressed by his acting chops.
The Intern, 2015. Robert DeNiro is a retired widower with a hole in his life, so when he sees a flyer for a “Senior Intern” program at a local business, he’s intrigued. He’s soon the personal assistant of Anne Hathaway, the founder of the company who is working herself to death. There’s humor here, largely in the old-school DeNiro teaching Millennials a thing or two – like the importance of dressing for the office, say, and not like they’re staggering into walmart at 1 am in their pajamas and plastic shoes with a case of the pizza roll munchies. DeNiro and Hathaway’s relationship is interesting to watch grow, though, especially after DeNiro realizes Hathaway’s husband – who does not look like he could catch Hathaway – is cheating on her. Seriously, her husband is Pajama Boy with an ill-kept beard. Wonderful acting from both Hathaway and DeNiro, I thought, especially when DeNiro reveals that his old factory is the site of Hathaway’s new e-boutique firm.
The Master, 2012. I think Phillip Seymour Hoffman was meant to be L. Ron Hubbard enticing a Navy veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix into his cult, but the movie was lots of quiet, intense conversations and I was actively watching the clock waiting for it to end.
The Apartment, 1960. A young Jack Lemmon, a young Shirley Maclaine, and Fred MacMurray feature in a film about a young executive who has been pushed into letting upper executives use his apartment for their affairs, but things go awry when he realizes the girl he’s smitten by is involved in one of the affairs. Fun romantic comedy.
OSS 117: Lost in Rio, 2009. A French parody of James Bond films that is absolutely hilarious. Where else can you find Robin Hood and a Nazi in a Mexican wrestling mask fighting? Lots of cinema references to other films like Vertigo.
A Serious Man, 2009. A Jewish black comedy about a man whose wife wants to leave him, even while other crises are descending, so he sees three different rabbis (one played by a Michael Knowles doppelganger) and things get progressively weirder. It’s….slightly reminiscent of the Book of Job. Probably the most interesting film I’ll see this year.
“Why does Hashem make us feel these questions if there’s no answers?!”
.
What About Bob?, 1991. A comedy in which Bill Murray plays a distrubed man who stalks his new psychologist (Richard Dreyfuss) on vacation. Watched this in high school and though it was hysterical; enjoyed it well enough this time around, though I now prefer Dreyfuss in more serious roles.
John Scalzi meets Randall Monroe in a comic SF novel with an insane premise: the Moon has been replaced by a giant orb of cheese. Or, to use NASA’s language, it has “assumed an organic matrix”. How? Who knows?! It’s inexplicable, and that’s deeply unsettling for those who view the Cosmos as inherently rational and ultimately understandable. Whatever it is was pretty thorough: all lunar samples on Earth have ‘assumed aged organic matrices’, too. When the Moon Hits Your Eye opens with a string of separate stories following how the Cheese-Moon impacts people in different professions (astronauts, ministers, fromagers, etc). At first, these stories delight in the absurdism and are seemingly unconnected, but that changes as the physicality of the cheese-moon kicks into place. When the moon begins compressing, it becomes unstable — and scientists realize that it may soon constitute a hazard for life on Earth. While the arrival of the Cheese Moon was already upsetting for astronauts who’d planned a lunar landing in the near-future, the prospect of being barraged by cheese-asteroids puts the people of Earth into an existential crisis. Like Redshirts, Scalzi deftly takes a comic premise and finds a way to make it serious and meaningful: the chapter with a pastor trying to talk to a drunk and hysterical parishioner was one of the most emotional things I’ve read all year. Beyond this, I greatly enjoyed the variety of characters and microstorytelling here. When the Moon Hits Your Eye is an unusual SF book, but succeeds in delivering a very human story in absurd conditions. I kiiiiiinda wish I’d listened to Wil Wheaton read it, but as it happened an ebook version was handier.
Quotes/Highlights:
“Beyond that, there’s no one else in the world who would have the technology to disappear the moon, much less replace it with a globe of, probably, cheese.” “Do we have that technology?” “No, sir,” Axel said. “And even if we had it, disappearing the moon and replacing it with an equally massive orb of probably cheese serves no discernable military purpose.”
Recently I was looking for the author Nevada Barr, who has a series about a female park ranger who works across the United States. The library didn’t have the early ones in stock, so I grabbed this one without really looking into the plot: it was tagged historical fiction and would give me an idea of the author’s style, so why not? Such is how I came to read a prairie romance about two women, though it’s more of a drama with some romantic elements. While I don’t read romance, this kind of relationship in a historical context struck me as unusual enough to try. I was honestly curious as to how Barr would develop Imogene in the context of the 1870s and 1880s. As it turns out, it’s quite the story of resilience, opening with one woman having to leave town in a hurry, heading west, and ultimately scratching out a life for herself as the manager of a stage stop in the wilderness — learning to hunt, manage roughneck visitors, etc. As the title indicates, though, the women — Imogene and her partner Sarah — have a life of hardship ahead of them, with happiness squeezed from it at great effort. As historical fiction, this is wonderfully detailed, driving home the harshness of life in the old west: as a “love story”, it succeeds on the characters’ emotional bond and avoids becoming overly graphic, though there is an attempt at rape and the novel is fraught with violence.
Bittersweet opens with Imogene having to flee her Pennsylvania hometown after her relationship with another woman is discovered — the scandal being made more volatile by the fact that the woman was a former student of hers. Armed with a letter of recommendation from someone who either doesn’t know or care about that exposed relationship, Imogene heads west and is able to find another teaching position. Her new town is small and its schoolhouse in need of attentive care, which she provides; she also becomes closely invested in the future of Sarah, an intelligent but extremely shy girl about to graduate. After Sarah graduates, she and Imogene become closer still, as Sarah gets married to an older man who is well-regarded in the community but turns out to be rather sadistic at home. Over the course of a few years, Imogene becomes Sarah’s almost sole source of moral support, rising where her parents fall. Unfortunately for Imogene, her habit of letter-writing reveal her address to the wrong people, and they expose her to the town — and Sarah is caught up in the ensuing drama, as her already-abusive husband now suspects that Imogene has corrupted her. They’re forced to flee, and wind up in the middle of nowhere managing a stagecoach inn together, a la Ruth & Idgie. (Fun fact: Idgie’s real name is Imogene, only she couldn’t pronounce it as a kid so she became known as Idgie. ) Finally, a happy ending? Hah! More sorrow awaits, but that’s life in the wilderness.
As far as historical fiction goes, I was impressed by the level of details that Barr works in casually: there are no info-dumps, but we’re subtly reminded constantly of our setting and the hardness of life — both materially and socially, since Barr doesn’t shy away from characters being casually racist or hardened by suffering. The story feels believable for its historical context: some of the men who frequent the stagecoach are former Confederates who left the war-broken South, and over time the stage struggles as railroads continue their iron advance across the wilderness. She features the changing landscape quite a bit, and since the characters are constantly on the move, there’s a nice variety — prairies and mountains. The challenges of the west are extreme for Imogene and Sarah after they begin running the stagecoach, since they’re isolated: everything that needs doing, they need to do. Fortunately, Imogene has a mannish build, something that comes in handy when she needs to pretend to be a man to protect their lease on the inn, leading to someShe’s the Man-esque humor amid people dying and coyotes harrowing the cattle. Interestingly, though this is described as a romance, it’s not particularly romantic: Imogene and Sarah have a strong personal bond that strengthens as they support one another through their shared adversities, but as written it’s more of an emotional intimacy than a physical one. The novel is at its most graphic when depicting attempts at rape, which I suspect most everyone thinks we could have done without.
In short, this was a surprise: when I realized it was romantic in nature I was tempted to put it back down, but Imogene’s resilience and Sarah’s journey from timid wallflower to confident young woman both impressed me. I have a couple of Barr’s park ranger books on hold and am hoping to see how her style matured, since this appears to have been her first book.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Fighting Little Judge, a biography of Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama and his political career.
WHAT are you reading now? Nixon’s White House Wars, an inside look at the Nixon administration.
WHAT are you reading next? Two possibilities are Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, or Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership. Still on a history and politics binge…
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Books We Loved But Didn’t Read”. TTT did that back in 2020, so I will revisit that list and check my reading lists of the last few years to see if anything new has joined.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is on my hopeful re-read list for this year.
Unnatural Selection, which I was sent as an ARC back in the day but shamefully did not post a review for.
The Age of Absurdity, which I’ve re-read several times but never posted a review for
The Once and Future King, on the return of over-powerful executives in America, Airstrip One, and Australia
This Brave New World, on DC’s relationships with India and China
The Way of Men, which I described as “Imagine if Tyler Durden wrote a book”. This one stands out as the only book I later reviewed!
The Evolution of Everything, on emergent order
The Roots of American Order, a cultural examination that looks at the role of Stoicism, Judaism, Christianity, and a few other elements in shaping American civilization
The Mind of the Market, Michael Shermer.
The Tell-Tale Brain, V.S. Ramachandran.
So, that’s the last list. What have I added since that were both bold end-year favorites and unreviewed?
2024: Abigail Schrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up; Jon Haidt’s Anxious Generation. I have a long draft for that one, just never finished it.
2023: The Filter Bubble: How the Personalized Web is Changing How We Read and How We Think; Feminism against Progress by Mary Harrington.
2022: Live not by Lies, Rod Dreher. (Again, long draft review.) How to Think like a Roman Emperor. David Brook’s The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.
2021: We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State, Kai Strittmatter. How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett
Almost another ten! Yikes. And if I’m not careful Provoked will join the list for this year, nevermind my long draft for it.
[Nixon’s] concern was my conservatism. “You’re not as far right as Buckley, are you?” he asked. “I’m a great admirer of Bill Buckley,” I replied. Nixon was then in a nasty dispute with National Review over a comment he made in private, that “the Buckleyites are more dangerous than the Birchers.” – Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s White House Wars
I ran across this title while looking for Nixon-related books, and it’s proving rather surprising. Although I knew “movement conservatism” was just coming of age in the 1960s, I didn’t realize Nixon put as much distance between it and his own politics. Buchanan’s book makes it appear that Nixon regarded the Goldwater crowd as an annoying subsection of his voter base that he had to throw the odd bone to. Given the period, there’s a lot of deja vu — student protests taking over college campuses, the president at war with the media, etc.
Related: Getting it Right, Willam F. Buckley. A novel about a romance between an Ayn Randian and a Bircher that explores the attraction and weaknesses of both approaches.
“There he goes. He don’t have no hobbies. He ain’t got but one serious appetite, and that’s votes.”
Back in 2016, I played with the idea of reading biographies of various populists, for obvious reasons. William Jennings Bryant, Huey Long, and George C. Wallace were the three figures who leapt most to mind. Although George C. Wallace is principally known for his symbolic stand in the schoolhouse door to stop the integration of the University of Alabama, he came into politics through the old Democrat tradition advocating for poor, rural Alabamians, and populism would be his mainstay. The Fighting Little Judge is a surprisingly fair biography of Wallace’s life in politics, one that reveals Wallace as a consummate political animal, striving for power from his teen days on.
Mention the name Wallace and the schoolhouse door image instantly comes to mind: defending segregation in the name of States’ Rights is what brought him national attention, fueling four presidential runs. When he began in politics, though — as a page on Goat Hill, serving the legislators — Wallace was more concerned with serving poor Alabamians in general. He rose from poverty, working his way through universityat a variety of odd jobs, and later served in the military. Smith writes that Wallace was offered OCS training, but declined on the basis of politics: he believes Wallace suspected a common soldier would do better in the polls than someone wearing brass on his shoulders. After the war, Wallace became a judge, the first step that would lead to him moving further in Alabama politics and ultimately becoming governor four different times.. He joked that he liked running for office more than he liked working in office, and the amount of time he spent running for president while living in the governor’s mansion reveals how true that was. It was a strike against him in one race, as the opposition declared that they would be a full time governor, not a part-time one.
It’s that vote-chasing that got Wallace in trouble and established his reputation as a bitter racist, a man who his haters half-expected to show up wielding a pitchfork or a whip. Judging by his personal behavior, Wallace exhibited no hatred for blacks. Indeed, when he served as judge, he frequently admonished white attorneys for not giving their black counterparts the respect due a member of the Bar, and Civil Rights attorney J.L. Chestnut commented that Wallace was the first member of Alabama’s legal community to address him as “Mr. Chestnut”. Wallace made an observation — long before he was shot — that life is too short to hate, an insight curiously close to MLK’s own saying about hatred being too heavy to bear. His first attempt at running for governor saw him being attacked by the KKK on the grounds of being too his lenient on black defendants in court, and too soft on the segregation question. (He was endorsed by the NAAACP.) Realizing that fighting for segregation was extremely popular among his base, though — presumed superiority over poor blacks being the only social thing poor whites had going for them — he flung himself into becoming Mr. Segregation. And it worked: the more he harped on the dangers of losing segregation, the more abuse he threw on the government and the intellectuals up north, the more popular he was. It was a Malthusian gamble, exchanging his soul for power. “When I talked about roads and schools, they listened,” he commented, “And when I mentioned the race issue they hooped and hollered.” Segregation was bundled with States Rights — resentment over the increasing role of the central government in people’s lives, a delayed reaction to how the New Deal had changed the relationship between DC and its subjects — and the fear of communism. The latter aspects must have surely been a large part of his appeal, too, since he was popular in states that had no race issue at all by the simple fact they were racially homogeneous. Interestingly, though, when in a different context like a formal debate, he would defend segregation on ‘rational’ grounds, pointing out that black-only schools created more opportunities for black educators, or that mixed-race football matches often created problems with racial fights between fans.
As readers may know, Wallace’s presidential ambitions and his role in the national spotlight ended in 1972, when a man who wanted to be an assassin of somebody (Nixon or Wallace, whichever was easier) shot the governor multiple times. Wallace would be paralyzed and live the rest of his days in pain, though astonishingly he ran again for governor and won. (The sympathy vote helped, one supposes: when he lost his first governor’s race it was against a man whose father had been murdered by the Dixie Mafia.) Wallace’s life definitely went downhill in the late 60s-70s: his first wife Lurleen died, his second wife left him after he was shot, and he’d been reduced to a man who could not only not feel his legs, but couldn’t control basic bodily functions. Getting shot was evidently a come to Jesus moment, though, as he began appointing blacks to office in Alabama, and continued to do so until the late seventies when he declined to run for a fifth governor’s term. Following his effective retirement, he became much more religious, and reached out to make amends to men like John Lewis, the Civil Rights activist who was beaten in the Selma to Montgomery march.
Smith ends the book by evaluating Wallace’s life and work and morals, commenting that while the governor always ran on populism, he didn’t actually do much in that realm. One of his contemporaries was interviewed and when asked to sum up Wallace’s role as a politician, the man replied: “George C. was good at winning elections.” Wallace was not a dedicated administrator, and appeared to devote more attention to rewarding his supporters with contracts and positions than making radical changes to impact the lives of poor Alabamians, black or white. Being absent while running for president didn’t help, of course. And yet…he must have done something, because rural/poor white boomers I know still speak with fondness about “George C”, and when I started researching on my own I found that he was responsible for the rapid expansion of trade schools and community colleges, highway-building, healthcare access, and so on. He also gained more of the black vote in every election he ran in: never compelling numbers (35% was the peak), but always more than could be expected from Mr. Segregation.
This was a fascinating volume to read, completely compelling for me as an Alabamian and a historian who has to wrestle with my state’s past every day. This is my first dive into George C.’s life, so I can’t comment too much on the facts: when the book intersected with my own specialty (Selma history), I noticed both good and bad. Smith correctly puts the site of Bloody Sunday as a quarter mile from the Edmund Pettus Bridge (contra the moronic media myth that marchers were attacked “trying to cross” the bridge), but he attributes the death of Reverend James Reeb to a deputy sheriff, which is baffling. There were four men involved in the beating of Reeb, and none had any connection to the sheriff’s office. (Reeb was a Unitarian Universalist minister who came to Selma in respond to King’s call for clergy, and within two days of arriving had gotten himself fatally beaten.) There’s also a…fantastical assertion that, following Wallace’s shooting, Elvis Presley met with him and offered to pay for an assassin to knock off the perpetrator: Wallace admonished Elvis not to ruin his career with violence. That sounds…all kinds of unbelievable, to be frank, and I’ve searched for anything to back it up but to no avail. Even so, I was impressed by its evenhandedness: Wallace is an easy man to villify, but Smith presents him as the messy man he was: a man driven by ambition strong enough to undercut morality, but ultimately shaken by the decisions he made. Quite good, I’d say.
Buckley: Conservatives find that Wallace’s background is that of a New Dealer, someone who is intensely concerned to multiply the functions of the state — George C. : You’ve made a statement here that in Alabama that I am for things you don’t exactly like. Name one thing — Buckley: If I may say so, your using public money for social functions — Wallace: Name the functions. Buckley: You want to care of of hospitalizations, of the senior citizens, of the poor — Wallace: Are you against taking care of the poor? Buckley: I hate the poor. I’m for shooting them. (laughs) I had a feeling you’d ask that (Buckley was …kidding.)
Quotes/Highlights
An expert at manipulating the masses, George C. sensed their uneasiness, “I guess you folks are sort of disappointed that I don’t have horns, after all you have read about me in the press.”
When the Ku Klux Klan endorsed John Patterson, the Attorney General did not publicly embrace the racist organization, but, more importantly, he did not refute their support. In contrast, Wallace made it a point to condemn the KKK in his campaign speeches. The Klan countered by spreading rumors that Wallace was actively seeking the “black bloc vote.”
After returning to Alabama, George C. mused aloud about how wrong the political elitists had been, “They thought I was gonna amble on the stage and say: ‘Hi, y’all. Sho good to see y’all. I’m just an ignorant, hookwormy redneck from Alabama come up to visit y’all. I ain’t had no education, and didn’t wear no shoes ‘til I was thirty. But, I come to ask y’all for y’all’s vote.”’
Never at a loss for words, Johnson immediately unnerved Wallace, “George, you have something in common with Martin Luther King. You are the only two fellows that have wired me to ask for an appointment with President of the United States, and then released the wire to the press before I received it.” Wallace was momentarily speechless.
JOHNSON: George, why are you doing this? You ought not. You came into office as a liberal. You spent all your life wanting to do things for the poor. Why are you working on this? Why are you off on this black thing? You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.”
A distracted George C. often did not seem to hear his children when they called him “Dad,” but would reflexively look up when they addressed him as “Governor.”
Wallace continued, as the reporters scribbled notes, “Yeah, lots of folks think I’m a bad booger. They think I’m a hate mongerer. But, I ain’t no hate mongerer—shit, life’s too short for that. You can’t waste it hating folks.”
“If George had parachuted into the Albanian countryside in the spring of 1962, he would have been the head of a collective farm by fall, a member of the Communist Party by mid-winter, on his way to the district party meeting by the following year, and a member of the Comintern in two or three years. Hell, George could believe whatever he needed to believe.”
George C. offered his own assessment. When asked by a reporter which political figure he most admired, Wallace smiled sheepishly, “Myself.”
How does a man who fought Hitler come to deify him? George Lincoln Rockwell began life as the child of a popular entertainer, and by adulthood was well-poised for a successful life. He’d gone to a good university, though his education was interrupted by World War 2, and was a gifted illustrator. Instead, political passion for fighting the spread of Communism in the United States made of this Smeagol a Gollum, muttering nastily about Jewish conspiracies. His increasingly entrenched antisemitism cost him his Navy commission, his family, and would later lead to his death at the hands of an embittered follower. How can a soul go so wrong?
There was nothing in Rockwell’s early life to indicate the disturbing course his life would take; his father was well known as a comedian, and socialized with other performers like Groucho Marx. Rockwell’s first blush with racial radicalism and antisemitism came after he finished serving in the Korean War. He had become virulently anti-Communist, possibly as a result of fighting Korean and Chinese communists,, and in meeting with other anti-communists, he encountered literature which attributed communism to Jewish conspiracy. Intrigued, he flirted with taboo and decided to read Mein Kampf, and was so galvanized by it that he fell fully into neo-Nazism, founding the American Nazi Party and buying a home to serve as its headquarters and “hate monastery” , even decorating it with a giant swastika on the roof. Rockwell appears to have inherited his father’s gift for spectacle and showmanship, as he used Nazi imagery to provoke response and gain more attention than his organization’s numbers could otherwise achieve. In a Playboy interview, he stated outright that he was deliberately using racial epithets because they would attract more attention when it was printed — though he told (black) interviewer Alex Haley it was nothing personal. (Haley and Rockwell maintained correspondence after that until Rockwell’s own death.)
Oddly, although he and several others of his leading circle were agnostic or atheist, they claimed to be fighting for the defense of “White, Christian Civilization”: Schmaltz’s assessment is that Rockwell was trying to specify white non-Jews, and didn’t want to use “Aryan” because people confused it with the blonde with blue eyes trope. His expressed racial views were eclectic, in part because he deliberately used different approaches for different audiences: formal arguments with ‘intellectuals’, impassioned race rhetoric for the working class. This meant he could say to one room of people that of course, “most Negroes” were good people who wanted to improve themselves — while before another audience dehumanize them entirely.
As Rockwell’s career in hate was unfolding throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement was part of the drama — and part of his rhetoric, as he blamed Jews for promoting ‘race-mixing’. Bizarrely, he and the leader of the Black Muslim organization toyed with the idea of working together, since they were both race-nationalists who wanted the separation of blacks and whites. Rockwell personally contributed to an offering plate Malcolm X was passing around at a BM rally, and even gave tribute to the man in The Stormtrooper after his assassination. Rockwell and his group had little use for other radical right groups like the John Birch Society — and they, despite being anti-communist, understandably had no use for him, parading about in the uniforms of an enemy not twenty years defeated. (A point of trivia: Mel Brooks’ The Producers, which uses a Nazi musical as a plot point, came out in 1967. One wonders if Brooks’ lampooning of Hitler had Rockwell in mind.) Despite his contempt for much of the right, Rockwell appeared to respect William F. Buckley: after Buckley dismissed him in a National Review piece, Rockwell began writing to Buckley, leading to Buckley suggesting Rockwell meet with a priest. Rockwell did affiliate with some other groups of the period: some of his members were former Klansmen, and he toyed with the idea of using the strange Christian Identity cult — an extreme sect that believed Anglo-Saxons were the heirs of Israel and that Jews were demons — as political cover, but being an agnostic who didn’t believe in anything supernatural (besides “Destiny”) got in the way of that.
Rockwell always cautioned his followers to stay within the bounds of the law, even as he dismissed other radicals for not wanting to get physical: his preferred means of direct action was picketing events, being flamboyant, and attracting attention. During the Selma civil rights campaign, for instance, he arrived in town with plans of having one of his followers dressed in a monkey suit ambush Martin Luther King and do antics around him. Rockwell was frustrated to learn that few in Selma had any interest in assisting a self-declared Nazi: the Selma business community aired an open letter in the paper warning agitators of all stripes, from King to the Klan, to leave the town alone. Interestingly, King and Rockwell met on the city streets and had a conversation, whereupon Rockwell was invited to address the crowd at one of King’s mass meetings: the invitation was rescinded when one of Rockwell’s men punched King inside the Hotel Albert while he was registering. Rockwell believed, apparently sincerely, that racial agitation and race riots were part of a communist plot to create the downfall of the United States, but he also simultaneously believed that during an economic crisis or partial social collapse that more people would flock to his banner. Eventually, though, he was shot by an vengeful former fellower, just as his counterpart Malcolm X was.
This is not pleasant reading, given the subject matter. Being biographically-oriented, it largely focused on Rockwell, a man who threw away a happy life for hate and the pursuit of power. He and his followers, barely a hundred at any given time, are constantly scrounging for money and living in what one journalist called “a firetrap”. Their entire life was of conspiracism and antagonism. For students of the 1960’s social and intellectual currents, this may be of interest for the strange connections Rockwell had with other personalities like Malcolm X. There are occasional surprises, like Martin Luther King’s observation that race-hatred was far more intense in Chicago than anything he’d witnessed in the South. I chiefly read this because of the section set in my hometown: I try to read anything with a Selma connection, both out of personal interest and because I’m the local history librarian. On the whole, though, it’s a epithet-laden book about a man who narrowed his soul to oblivion and ultimately died for his nastiness.
This has been a quiet review week, in large part because I am trudging through a book I don’t like but have spent too much time trying to read to abandon it. Good ol’ sunk cost fallacy, how can I be aware of you and yet persist? I noticed recently that Vero at Dark Shelf of Wonders did a “Last Ten Books” tag, and I figured — why not?
(1) Last Book I Didn’t Finish: Congress for Dummies. I haven’t officially DNF’d it, but I have lost all interest in it. It’s over 20 years old and reading about committee processes is godawful boring.
(2) The Last Book I Reread. Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons.
(3) The Last Book I Bought. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. Currently waiting for me at the post office!
(4) The Last Book I Said I Read and Didn’t Really. Best I can do is reading an abridged version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame instead of the real thing.
(5) The Last Book I Wrote in the Margins Of. Write in a book?
(6) The Last Book I Had Signed. Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder. Funny thing, I’d actually preordered the ebook version, then bought the print version while in line to talk to him so he could sign it, then I wound up cancelling the ebook version and later reordering the ebook version because I’d lent it out to someone and wanted to re-read it.
(7) The Last Book I Lost. Um….me and books are like the Pentagon and billions of dollars. No only do I often not know where they are, I don’t even know that I don’t know where they are.
(8) The Last Book I Had to Replace. Mm…well, Living in Wonder would count, but I also reordered Rifles for Watie for a re-read I’ve yet to do.
(9) The Last Book I Had an Argument Over. Honestly can’t remember. My IRL friends who read rarely read the same books I do.
(10) The Last Book I Couldn’t Get A Hold Of. Erm……obscure books quoted in other books are always popping up onto my interest list and then disappearing when I realize I can’t find an affordable copy. Most recently was a trilogy by Eric Voeglin:
I’ve not quite given up on these, as I might have access via my university.
Today’s TTT is books set in _______, so I’m going to fill in the blank with….the American Civil War!
“I have even made attempts to see if I could finance a psychiatrist, not because I really do think I am nuts, but because I recognize that every nut thinks he is RIGHT. If I am NOT right, and am heading for this HORRIBLE battle, I DEARLY wish to be disabused of my delusion.”
(1) The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara. The story of Gettysburg, from the men and generals who fought it.
(2) Rifles for Watie, Harold Keith. I read this as a teenager and it was thought-provoking, exploring the reasons why different men fought in the war. It also introduced me to the Cherokee participation in the war: General Stand Watie was the last Confederate officer to surrender.
(3)Casualties, David Rothstein. A Union soldier who just survived the Battle of Gettysburg has been captured by the Confederates and sent to Castle Morgan in Cahawba, Alabama. His wife aims to go see him, war or no war.
(4) Selma: A Novel of the Civil War, Val McGee. A novel set in my hometown during an era when it was not only prosperous, but regionally dominant. The town was burned by Yankees during the last week of the war, but rebounded.
(5)All Other Nights, Dar Horn. An interesting mystery-thriller focusing on southern Jews and a Confederate spy ring. My review described it as the best Civil War novel I’ve read in a “long, long, time”.
(6) & (7) Gods and Generals and Last Full Measure I probably shouldn’t list these since I haven’t read them in more than twenty years, but they were Jeff Shaara’s attempt to make his dad’s Killer Angels into a trilogy. Gods and Generals covers the outbreak of the war and its first two years, ending with Stonewall Jackson’s death, and Last Full Measure covered the last year or so of the war.
(8) The Copperhead, Harold Frederics. A look at a Northern town that destroys itself in its attempt to silence a man who speaks out against the war on Constitutional principles. Later turned into a movie.
(9) The Starbuck Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell. A trilogy about a Bostonian who finds himself fighting for the South after he’s hired to be a bodyguard. A woman is involved, too. (There are always women involved in a Cornwell novel.)
(10) Gone with the Wind. A Civil War novel list without GOTW? Fiddle-de-dee!
(11) The Unvanquished, William Faulkner. A novel about a family living through the South’s collapse.
Reading Freely 
