Excellent read. Thx! Enlightening comparison. Hard to keep up. I wasn’t aware of the recent gag order in Congress. Facts suppressed in the great halls. All frightening.
Americans have been trained to watch too much tv, be good consumers, and style & political affiliation tribe members. Aside from the tough coyboy stereotype, another popular myth is the tough guy / nihilist gangster who lives above the law. <> The dipshits who made serial liar, fraudster and failed businessman, DJT into a make believe business genius with the fake reality teevee Apprentice show are degenerate destroyers of democracy. They knew the crushed adderall snorting, dirty diaper wearing rapist was toxic but buttabing buttaboom gangsterism sells bigly so we’re stuck with a real sociopath controlling the Republican Party, aligned with real mafia state gangster, Vladimir Putin. <> Wealth supremacy and craven greed continuously push to shape the public narrative in their favor. The most hated man in DC, former owner of the NFL Washington Red Skins / Commanders, Dan Snyder is the controling owner of a movie production company and is suppressing distribution of his own - The Apprentice movie in the USA because he thinks the director went too far exposing the vile debauchery that exists within The Former Guy.
Nina, you are a national treasure, and I do think that history is on your side, just as with JQA. Here in southern France where I live, I’ve been reading about the French Crusades for a while. Never heard of it? Most people have heard of the Jerusalem Crusades; not so many the French Crusades. I bring this up as it’s no different in concept from (slavery-driven) Civil War or the current battle for the soul of the nation in the US. To put it in personal terms, it’s well-documented that quite a few citizens were burned at the stake in my little village in the 13th Century for the crime of…not being Catholic. Eight hundred years later, I see the same threat looming in the US if you’re not a card-carrying Christian Nationalist MAGAt, should Trump win in November. Not much has changed in eight centuries except we’ve gotten much better at mass slaughter. And once again, it’s up to the rest of us to push these people back down into the holes they crawled out of, just like so many generations that have gone before us. And, yes, I’m up for the challenge. Why else are we put here on earth but to leave it a better place than we found it?
I hope you're right about this, Nina: "The House Republicans of 2024 will go down in history as the 21st Century version of the losers of the Civil War." I was just judging the Gerald Loeb Awards with top journalists from all over: Many of them told me they expect Trump will win.
Thanks Nina! More and more it feels like we are reliving a modernized version of Pre-Civil War America and your book shows some things have been with us from the start!
A colleague here in Jerusalem had a teaching sabbatical at a State-supported school next to Ann Arbor. He decided to show students Michael Moore's film Roger and Me, an expose of GM's pull out of Flint, Michigan. As an anthropologist, I found the film an accurate description of the hard times in the southern part of the State. Students thought otherwise and complained to the Dean that Moore was making fun of their blue-collar working-class lifestyle and the professor was now forbidden to show the film again.
Corrected to make clear that John Quincy Adams is the STATESMAN of the tile.
And here’s a link to my book. https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Statesman-Smithson-Americas-Smithsonian/dp/0060002417
Excellent read. Thx! Enlightening comparison. Hard to keep up. I wasn’t aware of the recent gag order in Congress. Facts suppressed in the great halls. All frightening.
Americans have been trained to watch too much tv, be good consumers, and style & political affiliation tribe members. Aside from the tough coyboy stereotype, another popular myth is the tough guy / nihilist gangster who lives above the law. <> The dipshits who made serial liar, fraudster and failed businessman, DJT into a make believe business genius with the fake reality teevee Apprentice show are degenerate destroyers of democracy. They knew the crushed adderall snorting, dirty diaper wearing rapist was toxic but buttabing buttaboom gangsterism sells bigly so we’re stuck with a real sociopath controlling the Republican Party, aligned with real mafia state gangster, Vladimir Putin. <> Wealth supremacy and craven greed continuously push to shape the public narrative in their favor. The most hated man in DC, former owner of the NFL Washington Red Skins / Commanders, Dan Snyder is the controling owner of a movie production company and is suppressing distribution of his own - The Apprentice movie in the USA because he thinks the director went too far exposing the vile debauchery that exists within The Former Guy.
Nina, you are a national treasure, and I do think that history is on your side, just as with JQA. Here in southern France where I live, I’ve been reading about the French Crusades for a while. Never heard of it? Most people have heard of the Jerusalem Crusades; not so many the French Crusades. I bring this up as it’s no different in concept from (slavery-driven) Civil War or the current battle for the soul of the nation in the US. To put it in personal terms, it’s well-documented that quite a few citizens were burned at the stake in my little village in the 13th Century for the crime of…not being Catholic. Eight hundred years later, I see the same threat looming in the US if you’re not a card-carrying Christian Nationalist MAGAt, should Trump win in November. Not much has changed in eight centuries except we’ve gotten much better at mass slaughter. And once again, it’s up to the rest of us to push these people back down into the holes they crawled out of, just like so many generations that have gone before us. And, yes, I’m up for the challenge. Why else are we put here on earth but to leave it a better place than we found it?
I hope you're right about this, Nina: "The House Republicans of 2024 will go down in history as the 21st Century version of the losers of the Civil War." I was just judging the Gerald Loeb Awards with top journalists from all over: Many of them told me they expect Trump will win.
Thanks Nina! More and more it feels like we are reliving a modernized version of Pre-Civil War America and your book shows some things have been with us from the start!
A colleague here in Jerusalem had a teaching sabbatical at a State-supported school next to Ann Arbor. He decided to show students Michael Moore's film Roger and Me, an expose of GM's pull out of Flint, Michigan. As an anthropologist, I found the film an accurate description of the hard times in the southern part of the State. Students thought otherwise and complained to the Dean that Moore was making fun of their blue-collar working-class lifestyle and the professor was now forbidden to show the film again.
Always a great read that makes me think!