The new issue has a review of Jonathan Franzen's new book "Freedom." This is the hot novel right now. Oprah has selected it. Maybe I'll read it anyway.
Paul Krugman coauthors an article on why the economic slump continues.
There are advertisments for upcoming Fall book releases.
This publication is necessary reading for me.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The New Will Bunch Book
The progressive journalist Will Brunch has a new book about the right wing crazies. I will be reading it soon.
Books of The Times
The Engine of Right-Wing Rage, Fueled by More Than Just Anger
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 13, 2010
Will Bunch
THE BACKLASH
Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
By Will Bunch
354 pages. Harper/HarperCollins. $25.99.
Related
‘The Backlash’ (September 13, 2010)
As Mr. Bunch sees it, there are three main reasons for the rise of the Tea Party:
1. “Genuine anger and panic by rank-and-file conservatives” who were deeply frustrated by the election of Barack Obama, and who “suddenly saw a world in which — thanks to a growing electoral base that did not think or look like them — their Reaganist conservative philosophy might be shut out of power for good.”
2. “The electronic media” — including the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and local talk radio imitators, as well as social networking forces like Facebook and Twitter — which have enabled “like-minded Obama naysayers” to come together “without actual journalists intervening to filter out untrue information like the canard about the president’s birth certificate.”
3. “The ever-circling capitalists — the policy pushers who saw a new grass-roots movement as a back-door way to revive the big-business agenda” that had thrived from the 1980s through the George W. Bush era, along with “the pure-profit hucksters” eager to cash in on voter anger.
Mr. Bunch seems to have spent a lot of energy looking into Reason No. 3: He writes at length about the marketing of items like gold coins, solar generators and seed bank kits to survivalist-minded, apocalypse-fearing consumers; and Glenn Beck’s sprawling TV-radio-book-merchandise empire. Other sections of “The Backlash” — a title that consciously or unconsciously recalls “Backlash,” Susan Faludi’s 1991 book about antifeminist reaction to the women’s movement — feature the author’s visits to events like the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot and the first national convention of Tea Party activists held in Nashville earlier this year.
Although Mr. Bunch — a senior writer at The Philadelphia Daily News and a senior fellow at the left-leaning research group Media Matters for America — tries hard in many of his interviews with various Tea Party-affiliated individuals to understand where they are coming from, he occasionally lapses into snarky put-downs that undercut the mostly reasoned tone of his book and his many persuasive observations. For instance, he writes of the numerous retirees and Glenn Beck fans at one event: “Not only did it turn out that the revolution was televised after all, but it also needed assistance out to its car.” By far the most compelling, if not terribly original, arguments in “The Backlash” concern the current media environment, which has amplified the loudest and most partisan voices, and helped spread fact-free theories about President Obama’s not being born in the United States or wanting to take away people’s guns. Mr. Bunch invokes Neil Postman — who argued in his seminal 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” that the entertainment values promoted by television are subverting public discourse — to explore the phenomenon of Mr. Beck and his shameless emotional appeals to his audience’s deepest fears about change and the threat of the Other (be it a black president, Mexican immigrants or East Coast liberals).
Mr. Bunch also builds upon the insights of Cass Sunstein (the author of prescient books like “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide”) to look at how the echo chamber of partisan Web sites can ratify radical, even dangerous, views, and how group polarization, especially at a time of high employment and economic anxiety, fuels anger and irrational rumors about government conspiracies (like FEMA-run concentration camps and black helicopters). Echoing other reporters and commentators before him, Mr. Bunch uses the writings of Richard Hofstadter — most notably “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” — to try to explicate the roots of populist rage that animate many Tea Party gatherings. And he goes on to suggest, not always convincingly, that psychological or personal reasons drive many Americans to seek “rebirth from the raw energy of the Tea Parties.”
As for the consequences of the so-called backlash movement, Mr. Bunch reviews well-known cases like the Republican Scott Brown’s ascension to Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts and the Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio’s capture of the Republican nomination in the Florida Senate race. But he argues that the “Tea Party’s true success in 2010 was not in electing their own people but moving incumbents” like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to the right.
Mr. Bunch adds that conservative insurgents have tilted the entire national conversation to the right, with Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration rocking “any hopes for a realistic federal immigration policy” and “Second Amendment paranoia” driving “lawmakers to take actions that would make it harder for authorities to keep tabs on guns and possibly increase the supply even further.”
For many decades, Mr. Bunch observes, “there were grown-ups involved in the conservative movement who tamped down the flames of extremism rather than fanning them.”
“Ironically,” he continues, “the main reason that the John Birch Society” — which went so far as to suggest that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer — “failed to gain much traction in the early 1960s was because mainstream Republican politicians turned against them, even though the party was at low ebb in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Barry Goldwater, the leader of the so-called New Right movement who won the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1964, did have considerable support from the Birchers, yet not only did he not embrace them but secretly authorized the intellectual leader of 1960s conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., and his National Review to go after the organization, successfully marginalizing it and helping to keep its Richard Hofstadter-described paranoid style in the shadows, even as that decade grew more tumultuous.”
Today things are different. Republicans are reluctant to speak out against Mr. Limbaugh’s invective. Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, has suggested that President Obama “may have anti-American views.” And Sharron Angle, a Republican Senate candidate from Nevada, has spoken of citizens arming themselves “against a tyrannical government.”
By “shifting the parameters on what is acceptable political speech in America,” Mr. Bunch says, right-wing insurgents have driven “distrust of government to its highest level in more than a generation” and mapped out “dangerous new territory for our national politics.”
Books of The Times
The Engine of Right-Wing Rage, Fueled by More Than Just Anger
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 13, 2010
Will Bunch
THE BACKLASH
Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
By Will Bunch
354 pages. Harper/HarperCollins. $25.99.
Related
‘The Backlash’ (September 13, 2010)
As Mr. Bunch sees it, there are three main reasons for the rise of the Tea Party:
1. “Genuine anger and panic by rank-and-file conservatives” who were deeply frustrated by the election of Barack Obama, and who “suddenly saw a world in which — thanks to a growing electoral base that did not think or look like them — their Reaganist conservative philosophy might be shut out of power for good.”
2. “The electronic media” — including the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and local talk radio imitators, as well as social networking forces like Facebook and Twitter — which have enabled “like-minded Obama naysayers” to come together “without actual journalists intervening to filter out untrue information like the canard about the president’s birth certificate.”
3. “The ever-circling capitalists — the policy pushers who saw a new grass-roots movement as a back-door way to revive the big-business agenda” that had thrived from the 1980s through the George W. Bush era, along with “the pure-profit hucksters” eager to cash in on voter anger.
Mr. Bunch seems to have spent a lot of energy looking into Reason No. 3: He writes at length about the marketing of items like gold coins, solar generators and seed bank kits to survivalist-minded, apocalypse-fearing consumers; and Glenn Beck’s sprawling TV-radio-book-merchandise empire. Other sections of “The Backlash” — a title that consciously or unconsciously recalls “Backlash,” Susan Faludi’s 1991 book about antifeminist reaction to the women’s movement — feature the author’s visits to events like the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot and the first national convention of Tea Party activists held in Nashville earlier this year.
Although Mr. Bunch — a senior writer at The Philadelphia Daily News and a senior fellow at the left-leaning research group Media Matters for America — tries hard in many of his interviews with various Tea Party-affiliated individuals to understand where they are coming from, he occasionally lapses into snarky put-downs that undercut the mostly reasoned tone of his book and his many persuasive observations. For instance, he writes of the numerous retirees and Glenn Beck fans at one event: “Not only did it turn out that the revolution was televised after all, but it also needed assistance out to its car.” By far the most compelling, if not terribly original, arguments in “The Backlash” concern the current media environment, which has amplified the loudest and most partisan voices, and helped spread fact-free theories about President Obama’s not being born in the United States or wanting to take away people’s guns. Mr. Bunch invokes Neil Postman — who argued in his seminal 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” that the entertainment values promoted by television are subverting public discourse — to explore the phenomenon of Mr. Beck and his shameless emotional appeals to his audience’s deepest fears about change and the threat of the Other (be it a black president, Mexican immigrants or East Coast liberals).
Mr. Bunch also builds upon the insights of Cass Sunstein (the author of prescient books like “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide”) to look at how the echo chamber of partisan Web sites can ratify radical, even dangerous, views, and how group polarization, especially at a time of high employment and economic anxiety, fuels anger and irrational rumors about government conspiracies (like FEMA-run concentration camps and black helicopters). Echoing other reporters and commentators before him, Mr. Bunch uses the writings of Richard Hofstadter — most notably “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” — to try to explicate the roots of populist rage that animate many Tea Party gatherings. And he goes on to suggest, not always convincingly, that psychological or personal reasons drive many Americans to seek “rebirth from the raw energy of the Tea Parties.”
As for the consequences of the so-called backlash movement, Mr. Bunch reviews well-known cases like the Republican Scott Brown’s ascension to Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts and the Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio’s capture of the Republican nomination in the Florida Senate race. But he argues that the “Tea Party’s true success in 2010 was not in electing their own people but moving incumbents” like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to the right.
Mr. Bunch adds that conservative insurgents have tilted the entire national conversation to the right, with Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration rocking “any hopes for a realistic federal immigration policy” and “Second Amendment paranoia” driving “lawmakers to take actions that would make it harder for authorities to keep tabs on guns and possibly increase the supply even further.”
For many decades, Mr. Bunch observes, “there were grown-ups involved in the conservative movement who tamped down the flames of extremism rather than fanning them.”
“Ironically,” he continues, “the main reason that the John Birch Society” — which went so far as to suggest that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer — “failed to gain much traction in the early 1960s was because mainstream Republican politicians turned against them, even though the party was at low ebb in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Barry Goldwater, the leader of the so-called New Right movement who won the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1964, did have considerable support from the Birchers, yet not only did he not embrace them but secretly authorized the intellectual leader of 1960s conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., and his National Review to go after the organization, successfully marginalizing it and helping to keep its Richard Hofstadter-described paranoid style in the shadows, even as that decade grew more tumultuous.”
Today things are different. Republicans are reluctant to speak out against Mr. Limbaugh’s invective. Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, has suggested that President Obama “may have anti-American views.” And Sharron Angle, a Republican Senate candidate from Nevada, has spoken of citizens arming themselves “against a tyrannical government.”
By “shifting the parameters on what is acceptable political speech in America,” Mr. Bunch says, right-wing insurgents have driven “distrust of government to its highest level in more than a generation” and mapped out “dangerous new territory for our national politics.”
Monday, September 13, 2010
It May Seem Strange
It may seem strange that I am reading baseball books in football season, but, after all, it is still baseball season even though I pay no attention to MLB other than check the standings every now and then.
I happened on to the Willie Mays book, and then moved on to Roger Kahn.
I have learned some things.
I know the case for Willie Mays being the best baseball player of all time.
From reading Roger Kahn, I've learned that sportwriting can be literate. It's hard to see that reading sports in the state of Alabama.
I've learned more about baseball in New York City in the 40's & 50's.
And I've learned that sports figures can be just as interesting as people in other professions.
I happened on to the Willie Mays book, and then moved on to Roger Kahn.
I have learned some things.
I know the case for Willie Mays being the best baseball player of all time.
From reading Roger Kahn, I've learned that sportwriting can be literate. It's hard to see that reading sports in the state of Alabama.
I've learned more about baseball in New York City in the 40's & 50's.
And I've learned that sports figures can be just as interesting as people in other professions.
Roger Kahn - Beyond the Boys of Summer (3)
One theory of great hitters is that great hitters (like Ted Williams & Stan Musial) walk a lot because 1) the good hitter waits for his pitch, and if he doesn't get it, he is content to walk and 2) after all, a walk is as good as a hit. Soon I will be reading the new biography of Henry Aaron. In the meantime, here is Roger Kahn's take on Aaron's different theory of hitting.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But, in a team sense, Aaron's natural style brings its own rewards. With the tying run at second, Williams may walk on a pitch just below the knees. Aaron may choose to swing, and if he is on a good streak, it's a reasonable bet that the score will be tied. Over a year, it's probably a good team risk, but over the same year this tendency pulls Aaron's individual batting average down. To both Musial and Williams, walks are a measure of effectiveness. Aaron accepts them with bad grace. "I'd rather hit," he says.
Roger Kahn, "Beyond the boys of Summer," p. 97
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But, in a team sense, Aaron's natural style brings its own rewards. With the tying run at second, Williams may walk on a pitch just below the knees. Aaron may choose to swing, and if he is on a good streak, it's a reasonable bet that the score will be tied. Over a year, it's probably a good team risk, but over the same year this tendency pulls Aaron's individual batting average down. To both Musial and Williams, walks are a measure of effectiveness. Aaron accepts them with bad grace. "I'd rather hit," he says.
Roger Kahn, "Beyond the boys of Summer," p. 97
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Roger Kahn - Beyond the Boys of Summer (2)
Willie conquered me. I had not come to praise him and sycophancy annoys me, but he brought to the game the outstanding collection of skills in our time and deepest enthusiasm to play I've seen. He was the ultimate combination of the professional full of talent and the amateur, a word that traces to the Latin "amator," lover, and suggests one who brings a passion to what he does."
-Roger Kahn, Beyond the Boys of Summer, p. 124, writing about Willie Mays
-Roger Kahn, Beyond the Boys of Summer, p. 124, writing about Willie Mays
From Frank Rich in the NY Times
As many have noted, the obvious political model for Obama this year is Franklin Roosevelt, who at his legendary 1936 Madison Square Garden rally declared that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies in the realms of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” As the historian David Kennedy writes in his definitive book on the period, “Freedom from Fear,” Roosevelt “had little to lose by alienating the right,” including those in the corporate elite, with such invective; they already detested him as vehemently as the Business Roundtable crowd does Obama.
Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.
F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.
Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.
F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Roger Kahn - Beyond the Boys of Summer
Roger Kahn is arguably the greatest sportswriter of my time: since the 50's. In 1972 he published the greatest baseball book of all-time called "The Boys of Summer" about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950's. Kahn began his journalistic career as a young man in his early 20's cover Brooklyn's Dodgers. In this nostalgic book he tracked down those immortal players like Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider to find out what had happened to them since the 50's. The result is a treat for all baseball rememberers, even those like me who aren't old enough to remember the Dodgers before they moved to Los Angeles in 1958.
Even though I loved "The Boys of Summer," which I read in 1972 when it was first published, I did not realize how good of a writer Roger Kahn is until I read this compilation of some of his best writing. He says in the preface that he aspired to write literature. That is quite an ambition for a sportwriter. I say he succeeded.
This compilation features excepts from his many books, mostly about baseball, Kahn's true sports love, but the book culls mostly his magazine pieces, profiles of some of the era's greatest sports heroes.
His profile of Willie Mays fits in nicely with the Mays biography I read recently. There are snapshots of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Joe Dimaggio. What's amazing is how Kahn gets into a few magazine pages an incisive portrait of his subject so that you really feel like you know the person after just a few pages. What a writing talent.
I'll have more to say.
Even though I loved "The Boys of Summer," which I read in 1972 when it was first published, I did not realize how good of a writer Roger Kahn is until I read this compilation of some of his best writing. He says in the preface that he aspired to write literature. That is quite an ambition for a sportwriter. I say he succeeded.
This compilation features excepts from his many books, mostly about baseball, Kahn's true sports love, but the book culls mostly his magazine pieces, profiles of some of the era's greatest sports heroes.
His profile of Willie Mays fits in nicely with the Mays biography I read recently. There are snapshots of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Joe Dimaggio. What's amazing is how Kahn gets into a few magazine pages an incisive portrait of his subject so that you really feel like you know the person after just a few pages. What a writing talent.
I'll have more to say.
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