FROM Arianna Huffington
Now that Herman Cain has "suspended his campaign" (I've decided to honor him by suspending my reading of anything further about his candidacy/book tour), the race is down to three people: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich. At this point, the question isn't so much whether Gingrich can beat Romney (he can), but whether Gingrich will beat Gingrich.
This task is complicated by the fact that there isn't just one Gingrich. He's a very Walt Whitmanesque candidate -- he celebrates himself, he sings of himself, he is large, and he contains multitudes.
Gingrich winning stage one of the GOP race -- the contest to be the Primary Non-Romney, and face Romney in the primaries -- wasn't that high of a bar to clear, seeing that he was up against a candidate who didn't know China is a nuclear power, a candidate who didn't know the U.S. embassy in Iran had already been closed, and a candidate who didn't know that the voting age is 18.
And it wasn't just a low bar to become the Non-Romney; it was also not that hard to become a real contender once Primary Non-Romney status was attained. It's been clear for a while that people don't exactly warm to Romney. He addresses the nation like an accountant -- and conversations with your accountant, however necessary, are never something you look forward to. As Jon Stewart put it, Romney "looks like everyone who ever fired your dad" -- every inch the management consultant/turn-around guy.
Newt, meanwhile, is like the crazy uncle you stay up late with after dinner, drinking and shooting the bull. He's fun, but you're never going to say yes to the crazy investment schemes he's always bringing to you. ("You're a hoot, Uncle Newt, but I'm just not sure about putting my retirement savings into your Alpaca farm idea.")
To put it another way -- and to repeat my favorite leadership metaphor -- Mitt is a fox and Newt is a hedgehog. In 1953, Isaiah Berlin published an essay in which he divided leaders into two categories, foxes and hedgehogs, quoting a line from the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." And in times of crisis and anxiety, people are often drawn to the clarity of the hedgehog.
Now, Gingrich is a serial hedgehog -- jumping from one big idea to the next. But he's a hedgehog nonetheless. After all, it's not as if he isn't just as much of a flip-flopper as Romney. The differentiating variable between the two isn't consistency; it's conviction. Whereas Romney tries to reconcile his flip-flops with lawyerly logic, Newt has the ability to seemingly believe each of his contradictory positions with absolute conviction. He is, wrote Kathleen Parker, "certain of his certainty." And for better or worse -- usually worse -- the natural selection of our political process strongly favors that trait.
That's one reason the latest Des Moines Register poll has Gingrich at 25 percent (up from 7 percent just over a month ago), Ron Paul at 18 percent, and Romney at 16 percent.
Romney was always going to have trouble if the Non-Romney vote consolidated behind one person, as appears to be happening with Gingrich. But, luckily for Romney, the one person it has consolidated behind is himself several people. So Romney might still pull it out by winning a three-way race, with Gingrich and Gingrich costing each other the top slot.
It has been so many Gingriches ago, it's hard to even recall the Gingrich of the early and mid-90s. That was the Gingrich who, in his first speech as Speaker, called FDR "the greatest president of the 20th century," and said, "The balanced budget is the right thing to do. But it does not, in my mind, have the moral urgency of coming to grips with what is happening to the poorest Americans." (That, incidentally, is the Gingrich I supported at the time -- until I realized that this Gingrich spiel was only empty rhetoric.)
It was the Gingrich who, in 1995, said of the Million Man March's keynote speaker:
I don't think that any white conservative anywhere in America ought to look at Louis Farrakhan and just condemn him, without asking yourself where were you when the children died, where were you when the schools failed, where were you when they had no hope, and unless we're prepared to roll up our sleeves, reach out and say, 'I'll give you an alternative.'
That was Gingrich 1.0 -- many, many iterations ago. And like Microsoft Windows, he's gotten worse with each successive version. As Maureen Dowd put it on Sunday, "he plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas."
This latest Gingrich is the one who calls child labor laws "truly stupid," and recently claimed:
Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash' unless it's illegal.
In fact, as the New York Times' Charles Blow pointed out, three-quarters of the working-aged poor do work. And crime rates have plunged, even while poverty has been rising.
This is the Gingrich who shamefully lent credence to a scurrilous Forbes cover story by Dinesh D'Souza by saying, "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?"
This is the Gingrich who suggested that Chris Dodd and Barney Frank should be jailed for having "profited from the environment" that caused the financial crisis, yet pocketed $1.6 million from Freddie Mac -- which he then claimed was for giving advice as a "historian."
This is the Gingrich who appeared in an ad with then-Speaker Pelosi urging action on climate change, but who last week, in answer to a question about whether climate change was man-made, said, "I believe we don't know."
This is the Gingrich who, 16 years after sympathizing with the urgency of the Million Man March, now tells the Occupy protesters to "go get a job after you take a bath."
This is the Gingrich who warns of "gay and secular fascism in this country," and labels Democrats and Obama a "secular, socialist machine -- [that] represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."
This is the Gingrich who, as Dan Amira nails it in New York Magazine, has held contradictory positions on issue after issue:
Health insurance mandates:
June 2007: "Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance."
May 2011: "I am against any effort to impose a federal mandate."
Cap and trade:
April 2007: "It's something I would strongly support."
November 2011: "A carbon cap and trade system... would lead to corruption, political favoritism.
Libya:
March 7, 2011: "Exercise a no-fly zone this evening."
March 23, 2011: "I would not have intervened."
And, perhaps most memorably, he called Paul Ryan's budget plan "radical" and "right-wing social engineering" and then not only quickly took it back but said: "Any ad which quotes what I said Sunday is a falsehood... because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate."
Gingrich has challenged President Obama to a series of "Lincoln-Douglas style debates," but it might be more useful, or at least entertaining, for Gingrich to debate all the other Gingriches first. Sparks would certainly fly.
"You can associate many things with Mr. Gingrich, but wisdom isn't one of them" wrote George Will, who also quoted Winston Churchill on John Foster Dulles to say that Gingrich is "a bull who carries his own china shop around with him."
The conventional wisdom holds that Gingrich's surge in the polls might not last because he has no ground game. But the biggest threat to his ability to beat Romney is not his ground game, it's his head game.
We'll find out starting in four weeks, when actual voters take over from the pundits and prognosticators. It should be interesting, since that's enough time for at least three or four more Gingriches to emerge.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Newt's Racism
Op-Ed Columnist
Out of Africa and Into Iowa
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 3, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: And Now ... Professor Gingrich (December 4, 2011)
NEWT GINGRICH’S mind is in love with itself.
It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.
His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.
He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.
“Part of the question I had to ask myself,” he said in a 1985 Wall Street Journal piece about war wimps, “was what difference I would have made.”
Newt swims easily in a sea of duality and byzantine ideas that don’t add up. As The Washington Post reported on Friday, an America under President Gingrich would have two Social Security systems — “one old, one new, running side by side” — two tax systems and two versions of Medicare.
Consider his confusion of views on colonialism. In the 1971 Ph.D. dissertation he wrote at Tulane University, titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960,” he is anti-anticolonialism.
“If the Congolese are to confront the future with realism they will need a solid understanding of their own past and an awareness of the good as well as the bad aspects of colonialism,” he argued. “It would be just as misleading to speak in generalities of ‘white exploitation’ as it once was to talk about ‘native backwardness.’ ”
He warned against political pressures encouraging “Black xenophobia.” What’s xenophobic about Africans wanting their oppressors to go away? It’s like saying abused wives who want their husbands to leave are anti-men.
He sees colonialism as a complicated thing with good and bad effects rather than a terrible thing with collateral benefits.
Laura Seay, an assistant professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta and an expert on Africa, blogged that Gingrich’s thesis was “kind of a glorified white man’s burden take on colonial policy that was almost certainly out of vogue in the early 1970s. Gingrich wrote this as the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements were approaching their pinnacles. It was most decidedly not the time to be arguing that white European masters did a swell job ruling black Africans through a system that ensured that most Congolese would never get a real education.”
When it comes to America’s British overlords, Gingrich is not so sympathetic. The bludgeon of American exceptionalism that he uses on President Obama was forged at Valley Forge.
In the introduction to his novel about George Washington and the Revolutionary War, “To Try Men’s Souls,” written with William R. Forstchen, Gingrich writes: “The British elites believed this was a conflict about money and about minor irritations. They simply could not believe the colonists were serious about their rights as free men and women.”
Gingrich, a radical precursor to the modern Tea Party when he staged what conservatives considered the second American Revolution in the House in the ’90s, wrote with delight of London’s shock when Samuel Adams started the original Tea Party.
But while an anticolonial disposition is good if you’re Adams, Washington and Jefferson, it’s bad if you’re Barack Obama’s Kenyan father living under British rule two centuries later.
Gingrich made one of his classic outrageous overreaches last year when he praised a Dinesh D’Souza article in Forbes, saying you could only understand how “fundamentally out of touch” and “outside our comprehension” President Obama is “if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
D’Souza’s absurd ad hominem theory tying Obama to his father goes like this: “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
This was a typical Newt mental six-car pileup. The man who espouses Christian values being un-Christian in visiting the alleged sins of the father upon the son; the man who reveres the anticolonialism of the founding fathers ranting against the anticolonialism of the father of America’s first African-American president. How do you rail against the Evil Empire and urge overthrowing Saddam and not celebrate liberation in Africa?
Newt is like the Great White Hunter out on campaign safari, trying to bag a Mitt, an animal with ever-changing stripes. Certainly, the 68-year-old’s haughty suggestions on child labor last week in Iowa smacked of harsh paternalism and exploitation.
He expanded on Dickensian remarks he’d made recently at Harvard, where he said “it is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid,” adding that 9-year-olds could work as school janitors.
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he asserted in an ignorant barrage of stereotypes in Des Moines. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”
Has he not heard of the working poor? The problem isn’t that these kids aren’t working; it’s that they don’t have time with their parents, who often toil day and night, at more than one job, and earn next to nothing.
Newt’s the kind of person whom child labor laws were created to curb. He sounds like a benign despot with a colonial subtext: Until I bring you the benefits of civilization, we will regard you as savages.
He’s Belgium. The poor are Congo.
Out of Africa and Into Iowa
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 3, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: And Now ... Professor Gingrich (December 4, 2011)
NEWT GINGRICH’S mind is in love with itself.
It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.
His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.
He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.
“Part of the question I had to ask myself,” he said in a 1985 Wall Street Journal piece about war wimps, “was what difference I would have made.”
Newt swims easily in a sea of duality and byzantine ideas that don’t add up. As The Washington Post reported on Friday, an America under President Gingrich would have two Social Security systems — “one old, one new, running side by side” — two tax systems and two versions of Medicare.
Consider his confusion of views on colonialism. In the 1971 Ph.D. dissertation he wrote at Tulane University, titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960,” he is anti-anticolonialism.
“If the Congolese are to confront the future with realism they will need a solid understanding of their own past and an awareness of the good as well as the bad aspects of colonialism,” he argued. “It would be just as misleading to speak in generalities of ‘white exploitation’ as it once was to talk about ‘native backwardness.’ ”
He warned against political pressures encouraging “Black xenophobia.” What’s xenophobic about Africans wanting their oppressors to go away? It’s like saying abused wives who want their husbands to leave are anti-men.
He sees colonialism as a complicated thing with good and bad effects rather than a terrible thing with collateral benefits.
Laura Seay, an assistant professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta and an expert on Africa, blogged that Gingrich’s thesis was “kind of a glorified white man’s burden take on colonial policy that was almost certainly out of vogue in the early 1970s. Gingrich wrote this as the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements were approaching their pinnacles. It was most decidedly not the time to be arguing that white European masters did a swell job ruling black Africans through a system that ensured that most Congolese would never get a real education.”
When it comes to America’s British overlords, Gingrich is not so sympathetic. The bludgeon of American exceptionalism that he uses on President Obama was forged at Valley Forge.
In the introduction to his novel about George Washington and the Revolutionary War, “To Try Men’s Souls,” written with William R. Forstchen, Gingrich writes: “The British elites believed this was a conflict about money and about minor irritations. They simply could not believe the colonists were serious about their rights as free men and women.”
Gingrich, a radical precursor to the modern Tea Party when he staged what conservatives considered the second American Revolution in the House in the ’90s, wrote with delight of London’s shock when Samuel Adams started the original Tea Party.
But while an anticolonial disposition is good if you’re Adams, Washington and Jefferson, it’s bad if you’re Barack Obama’s Kenyan father living under British rule two centuries later.
Gingrich made one of his classic outrageous overreaches last year when he praised a Dinesh D’Souza article in Forbes, saying you could only understand how “fundamentally out of touch” and “outside our comprehension” President Obama is “if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
D’Souza’s absurd ad hominem theory tying Obama to his father goes like this: “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
This was a typical Newt mental six-car pileup. The man who espouses Christian values being un-Christian in visiting the alleged sins of the father upon the son; the man who reveres the anticolonialism of the founding fathers ranting against the anticolonialism of the father of America’s first African-American president. How do you rail against the Evil Empire and urge overthrowing Saddam and not celebrate liberation in Africa?
Newt is like the Great White Hunter out on campaign safari, trying to bag a Mitt, an animal with ever-changing stripes. Certainly, the 68-year-old’s haughty suggestions on child labor last week in Iowa smacked of harsh paternalism and exploitation.
He expanded on Dickensian remarks he’d made recently at Harvard, where he said “it is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid,” adding that 9-year-olds could work as school janitors.
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he asserted in an ignorant barrage of stereotypes in Des Moines. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”
Has he not heard of the working poor? The problem isn’t that these kids aren’t working; it’s that they don’t have time with their parents, who often toil day and night, at more than one job, and earn next to nothing.
Newt’s the kind of person whom child labor laws were created to curb. He sounds like a benign despot with a colonial subtext: Until I bring you the benefits of civilization, we will regard you as savages.
He’s Belgium. The poor are Congo.
Friday, December 2, 2011
On Rereading
I have never been much of a rereader.
by David Bowman
“My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only read one book in my life, and that is ‘White Fang.’ It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.” (Nancy Mitford, “The Pursuit of Love,” 1945)
Reread Shakespeare. Reread Shakespeare. I endlessly reread Shakespeare,” says the American Falstaff, Harold Bloom.
Now consider Patti Smith, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction for her memoir, “Just Kids”: “I’m about to reread César Aira’s ‘An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter’ once again,” she said in a telephone interview from France. “The book’s mere 87 pages are so multifaceted and transporting and I get so absorbed that upon finishing I don’t remember anything. Like having a complex cinematic dream that dissipates upon awakening.”
Lots of writers reread their favorite books — and not just once or twice. Stephen King, who wears a T-shirt with the slogan Quot libros, quam breve tempus (“So many books, so little time”), has read “Lord of the Flies” eight or nine times, he said via e-mail, and “Lord of the Rings” three or four. King has also read Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love” and Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” three or four times each; James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity” four or five times; and John D. MacDonald’s 1960 thriller “The End of the Night” some half a dozen times. Of that book, about a college dropout’s killing spree, King said: “It’s one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. This is a novel Émile Zola would have relished.”
Writers are not the only ones who reread books, of course. In her recently published “On Rereading,” the retired English professor Patricia Meyer Spacks cites a friend who “claimed that she hated to reread. When I pointed out that I have known her to reread Jane Austen, she looked surprised. ‘Everyone rereads Jane Austen.’ ” (Everyone who reads her in the first place, maybe: King said in his e-mail that “I have never read a single word of Jane Austen.”)
Many authors also return regularly to Virginia Woolf. The novelist and critic Dale Peck tries to read “The Waves” every year. “It affects me like spiritual instruction,” he said. “I always feel like a better person after I put it down.” The New Yorker critic James Wood rereads “To the Lighthouse” annually: “It’s a joy to return to, perpetually rich, perpetually moving.” And the novelist Sophie Gee revisits “Mrs. Dalloway” when she can: “The magnificence of the writing is so overwhelming. Clarissa Dalloway has a realness for me that no other heroine quite matches.”
For many rereaders, the habit started in childhood. Helen DeWitt, whose most recent novel is “Lightning Rods,” provided a list of nearly 100 books she regularly rereads, but said it all began with just one series — the Nancy Drew mysteries. Similarly, Patti Smith started her rereading when she was just a kid. “I have always reread,” she said. “I read ‘The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins’ by Dr. Seuss over and over. And I read it to my siblings.” When Dale Peck was 10, he moved to a Kansas wilderness with no public library. “One summer,” he said, “my stepmother brought a box of books from her parents’ attic to our house containing ‘Valley of the Dolls’ and ‘Peyton Place,’ both of which I read over and over.” Bharati Mukherjee, author of the novel “Miss New India,” reread Louisa May Alcott’s oeuvre a half-dozen times when she was 9. (At the same age, she said, she began writing a novel about three child detectives; it remains unfinished.)
Like any reader, writers may discover after rereading that a book has transformed from a sexy college date into a louse. “I remembered loving Henry James’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ when I studied it for my Ph.D. comps,” Mukherjee said. “This summer I tried to reread it. I soon abandoned the book, screaming, ‘Enough complex interiority, just give me a couple of big head-butting scenes!’ ” Siddhartha Deb, author of “The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India,” had a kind of older-and-wiser experience with “The Great Gatsby,” which he first read at Columbia University. “I had a vague sense that it might me tell me something about America,” he said. “I reread it hence and found that almost everything it had to say to me was about contemporary India.”
There are motives to reread that are unique to writers. The biographer and novelist Edmund White sums up one of the more touching ones: “I reread in order to remind myself how good you have to be in order to be any good at all.”
The novelist Madison Smartt Bell rereads the fiction of both Mary Gaitskill and Robert Stone the way one architect might appreciate another’s blueprints. “Both Gaitskill and Stone have a lapidary realism,” he said. “You can climb inside their stories and walk around seeing objects more exactly. It’s like a three-dimensional place, instead of an illusion. Most writers just give you one surface.” Ben Marcus, whose novel “The Flame Alphabet” will be published in January, pores over Kafka’s diaries as thoroughly as a C.I.A. psychologist: “It’s a way to spy into Kafka’s workshop. His fiction is perfectly enigmatic, yet his diaries contain transparent subject matter presented more casually than his fiction, revealing the atmosphere that preoccupied the mysterious writer.”
Some authors reread as a kind of calisthenics. Before Elmore Leonard begins his day’s writing, he sometimes rereads a portion of George V. Higgins’s “Friends of Eddie Coyle.” “When the book came out in 1972,” Leonard explained, “my Hollywood agent said: ‘This is your kind of stuff, kiddo. Rush out and get it before you write another word.’ I did. The book set me free. I saw, this was how you do it. I learned so much about dialogue and cadence from this book.” Likewise, before the novelist Jonathan Lethem begins work each day, he may return to William Maxwell or Paula Fox or James Salter. “I choose text where every decoration has been flayed from the prose,” said Lethem, whose most recent book is the nonfiction collection “The Ecstasy of Influence.” “It’s more than ‘What a relief there are no adverbs.’ It’s text that has a courage, a leaping-in quality.” Another writer who rereads to prepare for the day’s work is the poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, who admires Emily Dickinson so much he doesn’t just reread her — he physically retypes her poems. “I love her subtle paganism and her anger at God and how her love for the whole world can be compressed to fit inside one woman’s bedroom window,” he said. “Also, she was alive at the same time as Crazy Horse. . . . Crazy Horse and Dickinson! They would have written such great poems about each other.”
In “The Pleasure of the Text,” the French semiotician Roland Barthes posits a reading-related dichotomy between books that cause pleasure and those that cause jouissance — a word he used to mean both bliss and orgasm. For Barthes, rereading may cause pleasure, “but not my bliss: bliss may come only with the absolutely new.” Yet Barthes neglects an additional energy besides pleasure and bliss: love. Rereading is a narcotic of love. As Patti Smith said: “I have never fallen in love with a book that I did not love all the more the second time. With each reading, more is revealed. One builds a beloved relationship, adding layers of associative memory and visual impressions. I’m like Gumby, excited to re-enter the atmosphere.”
by David Bowman
“My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only read one book in my life, and that is ‘White Fang.’ It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.” (Nancy Mitford, “The Pursuit of Love,” 1945)
Reread Shakespeare. Reread Shakespeare. I endlessly reread Shakespeare,” says the American Falstaff, Harold Bloom.
Now consider Patti Smith, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction for her memoir, “Just Kids”: “I’m about to reread César Aira’s ‘An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter’ once again,” she said in a telephone interview from France. “The book’s mere 87 pages are so multifaceted and transporting and I get so absorbed that upon finishing I don’t remember anything. Like having a complex cinematic dream that dissipates upon awakening.”
Lots of writers reread their favorite books — and not just once or twice. Stephen King, who wears a T-shirt with the slogan Quot libros, quam breve tempus (“So many books, so little time”), has read “Lord of the Flies” eight or nine times, he said via e-mail, and “Lord of the Rings” three or four. King has also read Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love” and Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” three or four times each; James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity” four or five times; and John D. MacDonald’s 1960 thriller “The End of the Night” some half a dozen times. Of that book, about a college dropout’s killing spree, King said: “It’s one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. This is a novel Émile Zola would have relished.”
Writers are not the only ones who reread books, of course. In her recently published “On Rereading,” the retired English professor Patricia Meyer Spacks cites a friend who “claimed that she hated to reread. When I pointed out that I have known her to reread Jane Austen, she looked surprised. ‘Everyone rereads Jane Austen.’ ” (Everyone who reads her in the first place, maybe: King said in his e-mail that “I have never read a single word of Jane Austen.”)
Many authors also return regularly to Virginia Woolf. The novelist and critic Dale Peck tries to read “The Waves” every year. “It affects me like spiritual instruction,” he said. “I always feel like a better person after I put it down.” The New Yorker critic James Wood rereads “To the Lighthouse” annually: “It’s a joy to return to, perpetually rich, perpetually moving.” And the novelist Sophie Gee revisits “Mrs. Dalloway” when she can: “The magnificence of the writing is so overwhelming. Clarissa Dalloway has a realness for me that no other heroine quite matches.”
For many rereaders, the habit started in childhood. Helen DeWitt, whose most recent novel is “Lightning Rods,” provided a list of nearly 100 books she regularly rereads, but said it all began with just one series — the Nancy Drew mysteries. Similarly, Patti Smith started her rereading when she was just a kid. “I have always reread,” she said. “I read ‘The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins’ by Dr. Seuss over and over. And I read it to my siblings.” When Dale Peck was 10, he moved to a Kansas wilderness with no public library. “One summer,” he said, “my stepmother brought a box of books from her parents’ attic to our house containing ‘Valley of the Dolls’ and ‘Peyton Place,’ both of which I read over and over.” Bharati Mukherjee, author of the novel “Miss New India,” reread Louisa May Alcott’s oeuvre a half-dozen times when she was 9. (At the same age, she said, she began writing a novel about three child detectives; it remains unfinished.)
Like any reader, writers may discover after rereading that a book has transformed from a sexy college date into a louse. “I remembered loving Henry James’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ when I studied it for my Ph.D. comps,” Mukherjee said. “This summer I tried to reread it. I soon abandoned the book, screaming, ‘Enough complex interiority, just give me a couple of big head-butting scenes!’ ” Siddhartha Deb, author of “The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India,” had a kind of older-and-wiser experience with “The Great Gatsby,” which he first read at Columbia University. “I had a vague sense that it might me tell me something about America,” he said. “I reread it hence and found that almost everything it had to say to me was about contemporary India.”
There are motives to reread that are unique to writers. The biographer and novelist Edmund White sums up one of the more touching ones: “I reread in order to remind myself how good you have to be in order to be any good at all.”
The novelist Madison Smartt Bell rereads the fiction of both Mary Gaitskill and Robert Stone the way one architect might appreciate another’s blueprints. “Both Gaitskill and Stone have a lapidary realism,” he said. “You can climb inside their stories and walk around seeing objects more exactly. It’s like a three-dimensional place, instead of an illusion. Most writers just give you one surface.” Ben Marcus, whose novel “The Flame Alphabet” will be published in January, pores over Kafka’s diaries as thoroughly as a C.I.A. psychologist: “It’s a way to spy into Kafka’s workshop. His fiction is perfectly enigmatic, yet his diaries contain transparent subject matter presented more casually than his fiction, revealing the atmosphere that preoccupied the mysterious writer.”
Some authors reread as a kind of calisthenics. Before Elmore Leonard begins his day’s writing, he sometimes rereads a portion of George V. Higgins’s “Friends of Eddie Coyle.” “When the book came out in 1972,” Leonard explained, “my Hollywood agent said: ‘This is your kind of stuff, kiddo. Rush out and get it before you write another word.’ I did. The book set me free. I saw, this was how you do it. I learned so much about dialogue and cadence from this book.” Likewise, before the novelist Jonathan Lethem begins work each day, he may return to William Maxwell or Paula Fox or James Salter. “I choose text where every decoration has been flayed from the prose,” said Lethem, whose most recent book is the nonfiction collection “The Ecstasy of Influence.” “It’s more than ‘What a relief there are no adverbs.’ It’s text that has a courage, a leaping-in quality.” Another writer who rereads to prepare for the day’s work is the poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, who admires Emily Dickinson so much he doesn’t just reread her — he physically retypes her poems. “I love her subtle paganism and her anger at God and how her love for the whole world can be compressed to fit inside one woman’s bedroom window,” he said. “Also, she was alive at the same time as Crazy Horse. . . . Crazy Horse and Dickinson! They would have written such great poems about each other.”
In “The Pleasure of the Text,” the French semiotician Roland Barthes posits a reading-related dichotomy between books that cause pleasure and those that cause jouissance — a word he used to mean both bliss and orgasm. For Barthes, rereading may cause pleasure, “but not my bliss: bliss may come only with the absolutely new.” Yet Barthes neglects an additional energy besides pleasure and bliss: love. Rereading is a narcotic of love. As Patti Smith said: “I have never fallen in love with a book that I did not love all the more the second time. With each reading, more is revealed. One builds a beloved relationship, adding layers of associative memory and visual impressions. I’m like Gumby, excited to re-enter the atmosphere.”
Vitamin B-12
The doctor says my B-12 is low and I need to take injections. Just happened to see this article.
Personal Health
It Could Be Old Age, or It Could Be Low B12
By JANE E. BRODY
Published: November 28, 2011
“She couldn’t remember names, where she’d been or what she’d done that day,” Ms. Atkins recalled in an interview. “Initially, I was not too worried. I thought it was part of normal aging. But over time, the confusion and memory problems became more severe and more frequent.”
Her mother couldn’t remember the names of close relatives or what day it was. She thought she was going to work or needed to go downtown, which she never did. And she was often agitated.
A workup at a memory clinic resulted in a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s disease, and Ms. Katz was prescribed Aricept, which Ms. Atkins said seemed to make matters worse. But the clinic also tested Ms. Katz’s blood level of vitamin B12. It was well below normal, and her doctor thought that could be contributing to her symptoms.
Weekly B12 injections were begun. “Soon afterward, she became less agitated, less confused and her memory was much better,” said Ms. Atkins. “I felt I had my mother back, and she feels a lot better, too.”
Now 87, Ms. Katz still lives alone in Manhattan and feels well enough to refuse outside assistance.
Still, her daughter wondered, “Why aren’t B12 levels checked routinely, particularly in older people?”
It is an important question. As we age, our ability to absorb B12 from food declines, and often so does our consumption of foods rich in this vitamin. A B12 deficiency can creep up without warning and cause a host of confusing symptoms that are likely to be misdiagnosed or ascribed to aging.
A Vital Nutrient
B12 is an essential vitamin with roles throughout the body. It is needed for the development and maintenance of a healthy nervous system, the production of DNA and formation of red blood cells.
A severe B12 deficiency results in anemia, which can be picked up by an ordinary blood test. But the less dramatic symptoms of a B12 deficiency may include muscle weakness, fatigue, shakiness, unsteady gait, incontinence, low blood pressure, depression and other mood disorders, and cognitive problems like poor memory.
Labs differ in what they consider normal, but most authorities say a deficiency occurs when B12 levels in adults fall below 250 picograms per milliliter of blood serum. Like all B vitamins, B12 is water-soluble, but the body stores extra B12 in the liver and other tissues. Even if dietary sources are inadequate for some time, a serum deficiency may not show up for years.
If the amount of B12 in storage is low to begin with, a deficiency can develop within a year, even more quickly in infants.
Recommended dietary amounts of B12 vary: 2.4 micrograms daily for those age 14 and older, 2.6 micrograms for pregnant women and 2.8 micrograms for nursing women. Barring circumstances that impair B12 absorption, these are levels easily obtained from a well-balanced diet containing animal protein.
In its natural form, B12 is present in significant amounts only in animal foods, most prominently in liver (83 micrograms in a 3.5-ounce serving). Good food sources include other red meats, turkey, fish and shellfish. Lesser amounts of the vitamin are present in dairy products, eggs and chicken.
Those at Risk
Natural plant sources are meager at best in B12, and the vitamin is poorly absorbed from them. Many strict vegetarians and all vegans, as well as infants they breast-feed, must consume supplements or fortified breakfast cereals to get adequate amounts.
Certain organisms, like the bacterium Spirulina and some algae, contain a pseudo-B12 that the body cannot use but may result in a false reading of a normal B12 level on a blood test. Despite claims to the contrary, laver, a seaweed, and barley grass are not reliable sources of B12.
In animal foods, B12 is combined with protein and must be released by stomach acid and an enzyme to be absorbed. Thus, chronic users of acid-suppressing drugs like Prilosec, Prevacid and Nexium, as well as ulcer medications like Pepcid and Tagamet, are at risk of developing a B12 deficiency and often require a daily B12 supplement.
Stomach acid levels decline with age. As many as 30 percent of older people may lack sufficient stomach acid to absorb adequate amounts of B12 from natural sources. Therefore, regular consumption of fortified foods or supplementation with 25 to 100 micrograms of B12 daily is recommended for people over 50.
Synthetic B12, found in supplements and fortified foods, does not depend on stomach acid to be absorbed. But whether natural or synthetic, only some of the B12 consumed gets into the body. Treatment to correct a B12 deficiency typically involves much larger doses than the body actually requires.
Free B12 from both natural and synthetic sources must be combined with a substance in the stomach called intrinsic factor to be absorbed through the gut. This factor is lacking in people with an autoimmune disorder called pernicious anemia; the resulting vitamin deficiency is commonly treated with injections of B12.
Although most doctors are quick to recommend injections to correct a B12 deficiency, considerable evidence indicates that, in large enough doses, sublingual (under-the-tongue) tablets or skin patches of B12 may work as well as injections for people with absorption problems, even for those with pernicious anemia.
Most often, a daily supplement of 2,000 micrograms is recommended for about a month, then lowered to 1,000 micrograms daily for another month, then lowered again to 1,000 micrograms weekly. Sublingual B12 or B12 patches, or even B12 lollipops, can be helpful for people who require a supplement but cannot swallow pills.
Others at risk of developing a B12 deficiency include heavy drinkers (alcohol diminishes B12 absorption), those who have had stomach surgery for weight loss or ulcers, and people who take aminosalicylic acid (for inflammatory bowel disease or tuberculosis) or the diabetes drug metformin (sold as Glucophage and other brands). Patients who take the anticonvulsants phenytoin, phenobarbital or primidone are also at risk.
Large doses of folic acid can mask a B12 deficiency and cause permanent neurological damage if normal levels of B12 are not maintained. Supplements of potassium impair B12 absorption in some people.
Although a B12 deficiency can raise blood levels of the amino acid homocysteine, a risk factor for heart disease and stroke, supplements of B12 have not reduced cardiovascular risk.
And while high homocysteine levels are linked to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, lowering them with B12 supplements has not been shown to improve cognitive function. However, in one study, among women with a poor dietary intake of B12, supplements of the vitamin significantly slowed the rate of cognitive decline.
Personal Health
It Could Be Old Age, or It Could Be Low B12
By JANE E. BRODY
Published: November 28, 2011
“She couldn’t remember names, where she’d been or what she’d done that day,” Ms. Atkins recalled in an interview. “Initially, I was not too worried. I thought it was part of normal aging. But over time, the confusion and memory problems became more severe and more frequent.”
Her mother couldn’t remember the names of close relatives or what day it was. She thought she was going to work or needed to go downtown, which she never did. And she was often agitated.
A workup at a memory clinic resulted in a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s disease, and Ms. Katz was prescribed Aricept, which Ms. Atkins said seemed to make matters worse. But the clinic also tested Ms. Katz’s blood level of vitamin B12. It was well below normal, and her doctor thought that could be contributing to her symptoms.
Weekly B12 injections were begun. “Soon afterward, she became less agitated, less confused and her memory was much better,” said Ms. Atkins. “I felt I had my mother back, and she feels a lot better, too.”
Now 87, Ms. Katz still lives alone in Manhattan and feels well enough to refuse outside assistance.
Still, her daughter wondered, “Why aren’t B12 levels checked routinely, particularly in older people?”
It is an important question. As we age, our ability to absorb B12 from food declines, and often so does our consumption of foods rich in this vitamin. A B12 deficiency can creep up without warning and cause a host of confusing symptoms that are likely to be misdiagnosed or ascribed to aging.
A Vital Nutrient
B12 is an essential vitamin with roles throughout the body. It is needed for the development and maintenance of a healthy nervous system, the production of DNA and formation of red blood cells.
A severe B12 deficiency results in anemia, which can be picked up by an ordinary blood test. But the less dramatic symptoms of a B12 deficiency may include muscle weakness, fatigue, shakiness, unsteady gait, incontinence, low blood pressure, depression and other mood disorders, and cognitive problems like poor memory.
Labs differ in what they consider normal, but most authorities say a deficiency occurs when B12 levels in adults fall below 250 picograms per milliliter of blood serum. Like all B vitamins, B12 is water-soluble, but the body stores extra B12 in the liver and other tissues. Even if dietary sources are inadequate for some time, a serum deficiency may not show up for years.
If the amount of B12 in storage is low to begin with, a deficiency can develop within a year, even more quickly in infants.
Recommended dietary amounts of B12 vary: 2.4 micrograms daily for those age 14 and older, 2.6 micrograms for pregnant women and 2.8 micrograms for nursing women. Barring circumstances that impair B12 absorption, these are levels easily obtained from a well-balanced diet containing animal protein.
In its natural form, B12 is present in significant amounts only in animal foods, most prominently in liver (83 micrograms in a 3.5-ounce serving). Good food sources include other red meats, turkey, fish and shellfish. Lesser amounts of the vitamin are present in dairy products, eggs and chicken.
Those at Risk
Natural plant sources are meager at best in B12, and the vitamin is poorly absorbed from them. Many strict vegetarians and all vegans, as well as infants they breast-feed, must consume supplements or fortified breakfast cereals to get adequate amounts.
Certain organisms, like the bacterium Spirulina and some algae, contain a pseudo-B12 that the body cannot use but may result in a false reading of a normal B12 level on a blood test. Despite claims to the contrary, laver, a seaweed, and barley grass are not reliable sources of B12.
In animal foods, B12 is combined with protein and must be released by stomach acid and an enzyme to be absorbed. Thus, chronic users of acid-suppressing drugs like Prilosec, Prevacid and Nexium, as well as ulcer medications like Pepcid and Tagamet, are at risk of developing a B12 deficiency and often require a daily B12 supplement.
Stomach acid levels decline with age. As many as 30 percent of older people may lack sufficient stomach acid to absorb adequate amounts of B12 from natural sources. Therefore, regular consumption of fortified foods or supplementation with 25 to 100 micrograms of B12 daily is recommended for people over 50.
Synthetic B12, found in supplements and fortified foods, does not depend on stomach acid to be absorbed. But whether natural or synthetic, only some of the B12 consumed gets into the body. Treatment to correct a B12 deficiency typically involves much larger doses than the body actually requires.
Free B12 from both natural and synthetic sources must be combined with a substance in the stomach called intrinsic factor to be absorbed through the gut. This factor is lacking in people with an autoimmune disorder called pernicious anemia; the resulting vitamin deficiency is commonly treated with injections of B12.
Although most doctors are quick to recommend injections to correct a B12 deficiency, considerable evidence indicates that, in large enough doses, sublingual (under-the-tongue) tablets or skin patches of B12 may work as well as injections for people with absorption problems, even for those with pernicious anemia.
Most often, a daily supplement of 2,000 micrograms is recommended for about a month, then lowered to 1,000 micrograms daily for another month, then lowered again to 1,000 micrograms weekly. Sublingual B12 or B12 patches, or even B12 lollipops, can be helpful for people who require a supplement but cannot swallow pills.
Others at risk of developing a B12 deficiency include heavy drinkers (alcohol diminishes B12 absorption), those who have had stomach surgery for weight loss or ulcers, and people who take aminosalicylic acid (for inflammatory bowel disease or tuberculosis) or the diabetes drug metformin (sold as Glucophage and other brands). Patients who take the anticonvulsants phenytoin, phenobarbital or primidone are also at risk.
Large doses of folic acid can mask a B12 deficiency and cause permanent neurological damage if normal levels of B12 are not maintained. Supplements of potassium impair B12 absorption in some people.
Although a B12 deficiency can raise blood levels of the amino acid homocysteine, a risk factor for heart disease and stroke, supplements of B12 have not reduced cardiovascular risk.
And while high homocysteine levels are linked to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, lowering them with B12 supplements has not been shown to improve cognitive function. However, in one study, among women with a poor dietary intake of B12, supplements of the vitamin significantly slowed the rate of cognitive decline.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Corrupt Bankers
Op-Ed Columnist
A Banker Speaks, With Regret
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 30, 2011
If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.
As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.
“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”
“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.
Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.
“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”
Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.
“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”
One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.
These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.
Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.
In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.
When I called JPMorgan Chase for its side of the story, it didn’t deny the accounts of manic mortgage-writing. Its spokesmen acknowledge that banks had made huge mistakes and noted that Chase no longer writes subprime or no-document mortgages. It also said that it has offered homeowners four times as many mortgage modifications as homes it has foreclosed on.
Still, 28 percent of all American mortgages are “underwater,” according to Zillow, a real estate Web site. That means that more is owed than the home is worth, and the figure is up from 23 percent a year ago. That overhang stifles the economy, for it’s difficult to nurture a broad recovery unless real estate and construction revive.
All this came into sharper focus this week as Bloomberg Markets magazine published a terrific exposé based on lending records it pried out of the Federal Reserve in a lawsuit. It turns out that the Fed provided an astonishing sum to keep banks afloat — $7.8 trillion, equivalent to more than $25,000 per American.
The article estimated that banks earned up to $13 billion in profits by relending that money to businesses and consumers at higher rates.
The Federal Reserve action isn’t a scandal, and arguably it’s a triumph. The Fed did everything imaginable to avert a financial catastrophe — and succeeded. The money was repaid.
Yet what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.
Sure, some programs exist to help borrowers in trouble, but not nearly enough. We still haven’t taken such basic steps as allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of a mortgage on a primary home. Legislation to address that has gotten nowhere.
My daughter and I are reading Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” aloud to each other, and those Depression-era injustices seem so familiar today. That’s why the Occupy movement resonates so deeply: When the federal government goes all-out to rescue errant bankers, and stiffs homeowners, that’s not just bad economics. It’s also wrong.
A Banker Speaks, With Regret
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 30, 2011
If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.
As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.
“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”
“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.
Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.
“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”
Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.
“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”
One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.
These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.
Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.
In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.
When I called JPMorgan Chase for its side of the story, it didn’t deny the accounts of manic mortgage-writing. Its spokesmen acknowledge that banks had made huge mistakes and noted that Chase no longer writes subprime or no-document mortgages. It also said that it has offered homeowners four times as many mortgage modifications as homes it has foreclosed on.
Still, 28 percent of all American mortgages are “underwater,” according to Zillow, a real estate Web site. That means that more is owed than the home is worth, and the figure is up from 23 percent a year ago. That overhang stifles the economy, for it’s difficult to nurture a broad recovery unless real estate and construction revive.
All this came into sharper focus this week as Bloomberg Markets magazine published a terrific exposé based on lending records it pried out of the Federal Reserve in a lawsuit. It turns out that the Fed provided an astonishing sum to keep banks afloat — $7.8 trillion, equivalent to more than $25,000 per American.
The article estimated that banks earned up to $13 billion in profits by relending that money to businesses and consumers at higher rates.
The Federal Reserve action isn’t a scandal, and arguably it’s a triumph. The Fed did everything imaginable to avert a financial catastrophe — and succeeded. The money was repaid.
Yet what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.
Sure, some programs exist to help borrowers in trouble, but not nearly enough. We still haven’t taken such basic steps as allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of a mortgage on a primary home. Legislation to address that has gotten nowhere.
My daughter and I are reading Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” aloud to each other, and those Depression-era injustices seem so familiar today. That’s why the Occupy movement resonates so deeply: When the federal government goes all-out to rescue errant bankers, and stiffs homeowners, that’s not just bad economics. It’s also wrong.
Finally the Twain Shall Meet
All day long yesterday I was HAUNTED by the thought that November 30th was somebody's birthday only I couldn't remember whose. I knew it wasn't mine or anybody in the immediate family, but I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that I was supposed to remember whose birthday it was. Then I had a dream last night. I was on the deck of a ship sailing from Bermuda to NYC. Mark Twain, decked out in hi...s famous white suit, turned to me and said, "You know it's my birthday today, don't you, Fred?" Then he said, "You really should read LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. It's my best work." I think we talked in the dream about that book but this is all I remember this morning. When I woke up this morning I immediately checked and yes, Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835. Thanks, Mark, for reminding me. Like I said, this is an eerie feeling.
George McGovern - What It Means to be a Democrat
If there is one essential Democrat today, it is George McGovern, the Democratic standard bearer for President in 1972. Though McGovern lost overwhelmkingly to the crook Richard Nixon, McGovern can hold his head up today and say he was RIGHT about Viet Nam.
This is not a great or imspiring book, but it is a worthy meditation on what it means to be Democrat in today's toxic political envirnoment. McGovern pounds his point that Democrats, most of all, have empathy, concern for their fellow Americans, whereas Republicans think it's all about ME. You can't be a Democrat without supporting the common good and the belief that Americans should stand together for a good society in which everyone has a chance to rise. Republicans do not believe this.
Government has a proper role to play in creating the common good, doing for the people what needs to be done that the people can't do by themselves. Republicans do not believe this.
George McGovern is one of the Democrats of our time.
This is not a great or imspiring book, but it is a worthy meditation on what it means to be Democrat in today's toxic political envirnoment. McGovern pounds his point that Democrats, most of all, have empathy, concern for their fellow Americans, whereas Republicans think it's all about ME. You can't be a Democrat without supporting the common good and the belief that Americans should stand together for a good society in which everyone has a chance to rise. Republicans do not believe this.
Government has a proper role to play in creating the common good, doing for the people what needs to be done that the people can't do by themselves. Republicans do not believe this.
George McGovern is one of the Democrats of our time.
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