US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

People used to think that television was aimed at the mind of a 12-year-old. Now it seems aimed at the hormones of a 14-year-old.

—Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs (1998)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

Thomas had effectively walled himself off from embarrassing questions about his private life. Hill would not be so lucky.

—Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

You all have a much tougher rode to travel. Not only do you have to content with the ever-present bigotry, you must do so with a recent tradition that almost requires you to wallow in excuses. You now have a popular national rhetoric which says that you can't learn because of racism, you can't raise the babies you make because of racism, you can't get up in the mornings because of racism. You commit crimes because of racism. Unlike me, you must not only overcome the repressiveness of racism, you must also overcome the lure of excuses.

—Clarence Thomas speaking at Savannah State College, 1985

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

Without the Cold War, what is the point of being an American?

—John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (1991)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

Our ideals are triumphing but American wealth, influence, prestige and power are all declining.

—William Schneider

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s

Where appropriate I employ the term "Tabloid Nation," which I did not originate, to categorize media firestorms such as those surrounding the Gulf War, the O.J. trial, and Monica Lewinsky.... When really important news took place, such as presidential dalliances with interns, electronic avalanches overwhelmed the populace. It remains true today and will be event truer tomorrow that never before have there been so many ways of acquiring information. Yet enough time has already passed to make it clear that the multiplication electronic outlets does not lead to a better-informed public, except in the area of celebrity gossip where giant strides have been made. While everyone knows more than any human being should about the failings of Britney Spears, the percentage of Americans who don't believe in evolution, who think the sun revolves around the earth, or who cannot find Iraq on a map remains huge.... The irony of Tabloid Nation is that we are all wired, all digital, all the time, learning more and more about less and less, a legacy that has been a long time building but never more so than now. The nineties offer many distressing examples of this.

—William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001 (2009)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

The First Gulf War, precisely because it was so easy, taught the military little and the future Bush II administration nothing.

—Historian William L. O'Neill

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

This seems to be the Any Warhol War... A quarter-hour of fame and maximum attention and, in retrospect, horrendous losses of life on the other side, but remarkably trivial in its consequences otherwise.

—Historian John Shy, quoted in The New York Times, January 16, 1992

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

SAVANNAH, Ga., June 15 — The yellow ribbons, now frayed and faded, are still wrapped around the oak trees near the Hunter Army Air Field here where horn-honking, flag-waving crowds lined the streets in the early morning hours last March to greet the first troops returning from the Persian Gulf war.

But here as elsewhere, the war seems like something from another era these days, and the talk is of other things: the sluggish economy, the dreary stretch of empty buildings on Broughton Street downtown, the record-breaking local murder rate.

A year after it began in fear and ambiguity and ended in relief and jubilation, the Persian Gulf war has receded to a degree that few people expected, replaced by fears about the economy and doubts about the country's ability to handle problems at home as easily as it dispatched Saddam Hussein's overmatched military forces.

At the Raytheon plant in Andover, Mass., where the Patriot missiles that helped decide the war are manufactured, the talk is of possible layoffs....

—Peter Applebomes, "Year After Gulf War, Joy is a Ghost", The New York Times, January 16, 1992, opening grafs

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

How to Survive

Every time I rewatch the trailer for How to Survive a Plague (2012) — and I find it compulsively rewatchable; I keep playing it in the background as I prepare for my lecture on AIDS on Tuesday morning — I tear up when I get to the part where Peter Staley, speaking in 1990 at the Sixth International Conference on AIDS in San Francisco, says "Some day, there will be a people alive on this earth who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease, and that a brave group of people stood up an fought, and in some cases died, so that others might live and be free."



Well, one small slice of those people will be the students in the course I'm teaching, on Tuesday afternoon. All of them are younger than the drug cocktail that produced the so-called Lazarus effect in 1996; that has shaped their world. But they should hear the story behind.

And if you haven't seen the movie yourself, see it. If you have seen it, see it again. Not only because it is an amazing story. But we have a lot of terrible evils that plague this world. This is how we'll survive them: by acting up. And fighting back.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!

—George H.W. Bush

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

Interviewer: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
Cheney: No.... Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?... It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties.... And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

—Bush 41's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, in 1994

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

...XVIII Corps also made good progress, the chief problem being mobs of surrendering Iraqis who kept getting in everyone's way.

—Historian William L. O'Neill

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

...The Gulf War now has a logo and a theme song. We had gone frm Vietnam horror to mainline entertainment. No wonder the networks push war so hard. Desert Storm's a hit show.

— David Hackworth, retired army colonel & commentator on CNN

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

I'm going to pop some popcorn and watch the war.

—College student, 1991

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

This [is] no time to go wobbly.

—Margaret Thatcher to George Bush '41, referring to Iraq, 1990

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

What's the difference between the US and Russia? The US has a communist party.

—Popular joke, circa 1991-1992

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy

[In contrast to the Brezhnev doctrine:] We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine. He has a song, I Did It My Way. So every country decides on its own which road to take.

—Soviet Foreign Minister Gennadi Gerasimov, October 25, 1989

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41 (Con't)

My opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And The Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, "Read my lips: no new taxes."

—George H. W. Bush, Nomination Acceptance Speech (1988)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41 (Con't)

This election is not about ideology: it's about competence.

—Governor Michael Dukakis, Nomination Acceptance Speech (1988)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41

I'm following Mr. Reagan — blindly.

—George H. W. Bush, as quoted by reporter Sydney Blumenthal (1988)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

The issue presented is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy... to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at best, facetious.

—Bowers v Hardwick (1986), majority opinion

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

We let the marketplace decide whether it's in good taste or bad taste.

—FCC commissioner James Quello

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

What Jesse Helms has done has backfired. I now know more about lesbian sexuality than I had hoped to know, quite honestly, because I have seen artist upon artist find the authentic voice that has been told it cannot speak out. And because they have defined what the territory is, we're now in their territory, pushing, pushing, pushing.

—An activist quoted in Steven Dubin, Arresting Images (p. 248)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

Identity politics amounted to demobilization into a cloister.... Marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House.

—Todd Gitlin

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

—Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

How wildly wrong [Reagan] is about what is happening in Moscow. Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West—actual disarmament will follow—by elevating wishful thinking to the status of a political philosophy.

—George Will, January, 1989

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds -- well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch....

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not....

[N]o one kept proper records of meetings or decisions. This led to my failure to recollect whether I approved an arms shipment before or after the fact. I did approve it; I just can't say specifically when.

—Ronald Reagan, oval office speech on Iran-Contra, March 4, 1987

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

Mistakes were made.

—Reagan, 1987 state-of-the-union address, about Iran-Contra affair

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

If such a story gets out we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we found out who did it.

—Reagan at early meeting on Iran-Contra

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War

They were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.

—Reagan, at a press conference, April 18, 1985 (referring to German soldiers buried in Bitburg)

I am convinced, as you have told us earlier when we spoke that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery. Of course, you didn't know. But now we all are aware. May I, Mr. President, if it's possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS. Oh, we know there are political and strategic reasons, but this issue, as all issues related to that awesome event, transcends politics and diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil. And we must never confuse them, for I have seen the SS at work, and I have seen their victims.

— Elie Wiesel to Ronald Reagan, upon being given the Congressional Gold Medal, April 19, 1985

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weight his song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children's children shall say they have lied.

— W. B. Yeats, "He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved",
quoted as an epigraph to Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust (1989)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

[Regarding] the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years.... None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband's deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends' deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

— Andrew Sullivan, 2012

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

I meet young gay guys today and they don't know what it's like to watch your best friend pound the floor with his fist in agony because the pain won't stop; to pick up a buddy off the carpet when you drop by after work, and see his brittle bones covered in fresh gray diarrhea; to see a friend wake up one day and be unable to tie his shoelaces because toxoplasmosis had eaten half his brain away; to have your shirt cuff brush past a friend's skin and have him scream in agony because of neuropathy; to dance on a disco floor next to a rail-thin guy covered in KS lesions who knows this is the last time he'll dance to anything; to open up the local gay rag and find 10 pages of obits where the real estate ads now sit; to hear a friend speak of watching as a needle is pushed into his open eyeball to alleviate the threat of CMV; to see your date consume two handfuls of toxic drugs twice a day to do something about a virus that would nevertheless kill him at the age of 29; to hear of couples torn apart and bereaved lovers thrown out of their homes because their in-laws hate them and their husbands just died; to scan the eyes of a doctor to see if he's lying to you about your prognosis; to catch the face of an old man on the street and realize seconds later that he was a friend who looked 25 only a few months before; to attend more funeral services than happy hours; to feel shame because of an illness; and to endure sickness knowing that there is no end or future except pain and death.

—Andrew Sullivan, 2007

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

I suspect -- I know -- my funeral will shock people when it happens. We Americans are terrified of death. Death takes place behind closed doors and is removed from reality, from the living. I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public; I want the public to bear witness. We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, friends, and families. And we are dying of a disease maintained by a degree of criminal neglect so enormous that it amounts to genocide.

I want my death to be as strong a statement as my life continues to be.

I want my own funeral to be fierce and defiant, to make the public statement that my death from AIDS is a form of political assassination.

We are taking this action out of love and rage.

—Mark Fisher, "Burry Me Furiously", published anonymously a few weeks before his death

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

AIDS demonstrates how economics and politics cannot be separated from disease; indeed, those forces shape our response in powerful ways.... AIDS will be a standard by which we may measure not only our medical and scientific skill but also our capacity for justice and compassion.

—Alan M. Brandt, 1986

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

If you ask me, I think they all deserve to die, because they took it up the butt.

—Mentor to bond trader (& future ACT-UP member) Peter Staley

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

It was my friends. My circle was hit hard and hit early. By 1985, almost everyone I knew was dying or already dead. This feeling of people disappearing was terrifying, because it wasn't just my friends and colleagues…. It was also the people I saw every day but whose names were not known to me -- the bus driver, the mail delivery person, the baker, the guy I would see walking his collie every day in the park on my way to work. One by one, all these familiar faces disappeared. And there was no treatment, and people died very quickly.

—Cleve Jones

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

If this article doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble. If this article doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get....

—Larry Kramer, "1,112 and Counting...." (1983)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

If I had written this a month ago, I would have used the figure '40'. If I had written this last week, I would have needed '80'. Today I must tell that 120 gay men in the United States -- most of them here in New York -- are suffering from an often letheal form of cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma or from a virulent form of pneumonia that may be associated with it. More than thirty have died.

—Larry Kramer, NY Native, August 24/September 6 issue, 1981

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America

In this respect our townfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away, and from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away...

—Albert Camus, The Plague (1947), trans. Stewart Gilbert
Quoted in Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (1987)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986 (Con't)

[Reagan] surely saw what would have been obvious to anyone in his position: You can't tell the American people that you will make them half safe. You can't say that defenses are "more moral" than offenses if they are designed to protect ICBMs. And you can't promise "to protect American lives rather than avenge them" unless you can propose to make nuclear weapons obsolete.

—Francis Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986 (Con't)

It's not just the hippies and the crazies anymore, it's everybody.

—Nuclear Freeze demonstrator, quoted in the New York Times

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986 (Con't)

Sir, do we get to win this time?

—Rambo, in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986

[Reagan] was an actor, the quintessential actor. What he said was what he believed. He didn't stand in front of his mirror in the morning while he shaved wondering whether that was the truth or not.... It's very unusual to have a president who is not interested in policy at all.

—Henry Kissinger

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

—Fictional character Gordon Gekko is the film Wall Street (1987)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

The choices this year are not just between two different personalities or between two political parties. They're between two different visions of the future, two fundamentally different ways of governing -- their government of pessimism, fear, and limits, or ours of hope, confidence, and growth.

—Ronald Reagan, accepting Republican renomination, August, 1984

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

Paint Reagan as the personification of all that is right with or heroized by America. Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America's idealized image of itself.

—Republican Campaign Memo, 1984

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

What I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich.

—Ronald Reagan, June 28, 1983

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

Reagan was to money what Hefner was to sex: an iconic cheerleader for a profound moral change in an age when celebrities created as well as reflected values.

—Historian David T. Courtwright

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate... It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory.

—David Stockman, Reagan's 1st term Office of Management & Budget Director

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

I sure hope he doesn't go on television to promote the elimination of fucking.

— Democratic Congressman, on the day Congress passed Reagan's 1981 tax cut

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term

In a 1976 episode, Archie [Bunker, on the TV show All in the Family], brooding over the Democrat Jimmy Carter's White House victory, may have had the last laugh when he warned that liberals would not be so happy when Ronald Reagan won in 1980. The prophesy was supposed to be an attempt at absurdly dark humor.

—Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive, p. 195

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 9, Ford, Carter and Politics in the 1970s (Con't)

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.... It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation....

We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy....

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning. These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy. We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate. We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.... The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.

—Jimmy Carter, July 15, 1979 (so-called "malaise" speech)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

Beginnings and Endings

This week we took Joseph to register for Kindergarten for the fall.

And today I went up to Hobart and William Smith for what may have been the final time.  (As happens to contingent faculty, after four years of being a Visiting Assistant Professor there — and eight years teaching there overall — I won't be returning next year.)

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 9, Ford, Carter and Politics in the 1970s (Con't)

Carter believes fifty things, but no one thing. He holds explicit, thorough positions on every issue under the sun, but he has no large view of the relations between them, no line indicating which goals (reducing unemployment? human rights?) will take precedence over which (inflation control? a SALT treaty?) when the goals conflict. Spelling out these choices makes the difference between a position and a philosophy, but it is an act foreign to Carter's mind.... Carter thinks in lists, not arguments; as long as items are there, their order does not matter, nor does the hierarchy among them. Whenever he gave us an outline for a speech, it would consist of six or seven subjects ("inflation," "need to fight waste") rather than a theme or tone.... Carter's cast of mind: his view of problems as technical, not historical, his lack of curiosity about how the story turned out before. He wanted to analyze the "correct" answer, not to understand the intangible irrational forces that had skewed all previous answers.

— James Fallows, "The Passionless Presidency" (1979)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 9, Ford, Carter and Politics in the 1970s (Con't)

I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.

— Jimmy Carter, Playboy interview, 1976

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 9, Ford, Carter and Politics in the 1970s (Con't)

When [Jimmy Carter] met privately with editorial-board members and veteran political figures across the country in the early days of his campaign—people who had seen contenders come and go and were merciless in spotting frailties—the majority of them went away feeling that in Carter they had encountered a person of truly exceptional political insight and depth. (You might not believe me; I have the notes.)

—James Fallows

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 9, Ford, Carter and Politics in the 1970s (Con't)

We built it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we're going to keep it!

— Ronald Reagan on the Panama Canal

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 9, Ford, Carter and Politics in the 1970s

...was there ever a Ford Administration? Evidence for its existence seems to be scanty.

—John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

What mistakes do people make about the “Film Stills”?
Referring to them as self-portraits.

—Interview with Cindy Sherman (2008)

Sherman completed the project three years later, in 1980, when she "ran out of clichés" with which to work.

— Biography at cindysherman.com

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

On TV POWs returning from Hanoi were shown passing the time by watching POWs returning from Hanoi on TV... We have entered an epoch in which nothing is real until it has been reproduced. With events and their copies standing in for each other... the objective form of modern culture has become the farce of mistaken identity. Facts no longer enjoy any privilege over various renderings of them.

— Harold Rosenberg

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

Television ate my family.

—Lance Loud

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

Very Brief, Spiler-Free Thoughts on Marvel's Agents of Shield, Season 1

So Agents of Shield turned out fun, in the end. For those of you who bailed, the place to start is probably episode 10, when the show got significantly better. To be sure, it took a second step up around episode 13... but I think 10-11 are good enough, and also important enough plot-wise, to make 10 the starting place. 12 is worth skipping; after 10-11, go on to 13, and then all the remainder.  (There are a few threads from eps 2-9 you'll miss references to if you skip 'em... but they're well worth skipping anyway.)

I do worry, however, about Season 2. What made s1 work in the second half was the arc. But the *last* time a flawed Whedon show tried this — Dollhouse, which also had lame standalones in the first half of s1, good arc in the second half — they went back to lame stand-alones early in season 2 long enough to get it canceled before returning to good arc. I worry Whedon comes from a time in TV's history when stand-alones were just expected, and that he tends to try 'em. And I can totally see A of S going back in that direction. Which would suck.

But maybe not. And the second half of s1 was fun. It wasn't as good as Buffy/Firefly, to be sure, or even Dollhouse; but it was enjoyable. Which nine eps in I really didn't think it ever would be.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

...the consciousness revolution, once confined to the youthful counter-culture, has mushroomed into a mass movement particularly popular among the more affluent members of society who can afford the time and money to develop their inner depths. From yoga classes at the YWCA and university extension programs to local "growth" centers and luxurious "awareness" cruises in the Caribbean, the movement has created a network of therapeutic outlets servicing outlets servicing millions of Americans who are bored, dissatisfied with their lives or seeking a God they can experience for themselves. It has also produced a lucrative market for packaged programs in enlightenment, such as Silva Mind Control, Transcendental Meditation (TM) and est, which have blossomed into million-dollar organizations by promising a "new you" to anyone who can pay for it.

— Emporia Gazette (Emporia, Kansas), September 3, 1976, p. 4

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

Three Exciting Pieces of Humument News

I just found out three exciting pieces of Humument news!

— News about what now?

A Humument.  A Humument is a book by artist Tom Phillips  Kinda.  Maybe it's three books.  Or not a book.  It's a something.

...Let me start over.

Once upon a time, there was a novel by one W. H. Mallock (1849-1923) called A Human Document (1892).  It came out, was presumably read by someone at some point, and then was completely forgotten, until an artist named Tom Phillips (b. 1937) found it at an old store when he was looking for a book to alter, to treat, to change, as part of an artistic project.  He bought it and began to alter its pages.  He crossed out, painted over and drew on each page — leaving, however, some words to make up a new (hidden, revealed) story running through the art.  The first edition — which was unnumbered, but which given subsequent events should perhaps be considered edition zero —came out, from a small press, in 1970.  A edition came out from a larger publisher, Thames & Hudson, in 1980.  (It is considered, I believe, the "first" edition, although so far as I know it isn't formally numbered.)

But.  Phillips continued to work on it.

He'd altered the entire book into a single, amazing artwork. But he kept altering pages — replacing old ones with new versions.  And then he'd publish a new edition with the new pages substituting for the old versions.  (Thus each edition is slightly different.)  The second edition (so-called, actually third) came out in 1986; the third in 1998; the fourth in 2004.  I own the fourth, having read it (Browsed it?  Looked at it?  What does one do with A Humument, anyway?) from the library.  Apparently Mr. Phillips's ambition is to replace every page from his original 1970 edition.  With a new version.

I understand that.  The various pages from the original edition is simply not as rich, not as wonderful, as the pages from the later editions.  Here, see for yourself: here is the third page from the original (1970) edition, paired with the current (AFAIK) page three:

You see what I mean.

On the other hand, sometimes he replaces a page I really like.  For instance, I really like both versions of p. 15:

And of p. 20:

So the process of replacement is a loss, too.  At least sometimes.

Not all of the replaced pages are originaly from the 1970 edition; some pages he has replaced more than once.  So far as I can tell (I don't have access to all the editions) these are often great pages replacing equally great pages (or nearly so).  (I should say at this point that not all of Phillips' treatment of this book is even part of the Humument project.  He's done altered pages of Mallock's novel separately, as part of other projects, e.g. as part of an illustrated version of Dante he did.)  What's really wanted is A Complete Humument, with all the versions of all the pages included.  Perhaps someday someone will publish one.

In the meantime, it's a marvelous book, highly, highly recommended.

Which leads me to the first of the three pieces of exciting Humument news.

1. The Fifth Edition of A Humument Has Been Published

Two years ago (why does no one tell me these things?) Phillips published his Fifth Edition (not counting, as always, the original, small-press, Zeroith edition.  So you can go buy it & read it.  It's great.

But what if you don't want that book?  That leads us to...

2. A Humument has an Ap (= an Ebook version)

Yes, there is an iPad — and iPhone — version of A Humument.  It seems to be based largely on the Fifth Edition (op. cit.), but also has brand-new, never-before-seen pages.  — Actually, I haven't checked out the iPhone version, but given Phillips's record, I have no confidence that the art in the two Aps are at all identical.

I just downloaded the iPad version.

It has one feature — an "not-too-serious oracle", which displays two paired random pages (a feature which Phillips seems very taken with) — not in the book, although I suppose you could flip through the book and pick two pages.  Or roll a 367-sided die, twice.  Or something,

It also has one flaw: it doesn't seem to remember your place if you close & reopen the ap — there's no bookmark function.  (It does, fortunately, have a "go to" function, albeit not one with the easiest to use UI.)  Or maybe I've just missed it so far.

But mostly it's the latest version of A Humument, with all the astonishing brilliance that implies, as an ebook.  (And about 1/3 - 1/4 of the price of the paperback.)  So go ahead and get that, too.

Still, it would be nice to see various versions of a single page, wouldn't it?

Which leads us to...

3. A Humument had an art show, and it's now online.

Through most of 2013 — and I really rue that I only found this out in 2014 (why does no one tell me these things?) — there was a show of A Humument up at the Mass MoCA museum in North Andover, Massachusetts.  The show displayed two versions of each page (it doesn't seem they ever included more than two, which is a pity).  They also presented the unaltered version of Mallock's book along with them.

Yeah, it's over.  It sucks.  But: they now have an online gallery of it.

With three versions of each page: Mallock's unaltered, and two by Phillips.  (A few of the latter versions — maybe 1/10? — are missing, perhaps to encourage you to buy the book and/or ap, which you should do anyway.)  But it's A Humument.  Twice.  Online.

'Nuff said.

Go see it. It's one of the great books — great art projects — great nested collection of various related....

Aw hell.  Who knows what it is.  But whatever it is, it's one of the great ones of our time.

Update:

Here are some Humument-related links from my bookmarks folder.

• The introduction to the fifth edition, from the main Humument page.
• A set of essays on A Humument, from ibid.
• You got the part where two complete versions of A Humument are online, right?
• Review from the Boston Globe.
• Review from the London Review of Books.
• LRB's interview with Tom Phillips.
• Review from The Kenyon Review.
• Kenyon Review's interview with Tom Phillips.

Enjoy.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Its 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively to the malaise of industrial civilization. Is your job boring and meaningless? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void...

— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

[There is a] growing despair of changing society, even of understanding it, which also underlies the cult of expanded consciousness, health and personal "growth" so prevalent today. After the political turmoil of the sixties, Americans have retreated to purely personal preoccupations. Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to "relate," overcoming the "fear of pleasure." Harmless in themselves, these pursuits, elevated to a program and wrapped in the rhetoric of authenticity and awareness, signify a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past.... To live for the moment is the prevailing passion -- to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity.

— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979)

 Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

The '70s was the decade in which people put emphasis on the skin, on the surface, rather than on the root of things. It was the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on.

— Norman Mailer (1979)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s (Con't)

I wish a buck was still silver
It was back when the country was strong
Back before Elvis
Before the Vietnam war came along
Before The Beatles and 'Yesterday'
When a man could still work, still would
The best of the free life behind us now
And are the good times really over for good?...
Wish a Ford and a Chevy
Could still last ten years, like they should...
I wish Coke was still Cola
And a joint was a bad place to be
It was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV
Before microwave ovens
When a girl could still cook and still would
The best of the free life behind us now
Are the good times really over for good?

— Merle Haggard, "Are the Good Times Really Over?" (1982)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 8, Society and Culture in the 1970s

The South Bronx is a necropolis—a city of death. There's a total breakdown of services, looting is rampant, fires are everywhere.

—Head of Neighborhood Health Clinic, quoted in The New York Times, 1973

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 7, The Rise of Conservatism (Con't)

... we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government. Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.

— Jimmy Carter, State of the Union Address, 1978

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 7, The Rise of Conservatism (Con't)

Everywhere we turn, Christian values are assaulted and in retreat. As Christians, we are not going to take it anymore.

— Reverend Robert Grant (1978)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 7, The Rise of Conservatism (Con't)

[W]hat galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.... It was at that moment that conservatives made the linkage between their opposition to government interference and the interests of the evangelical movement, which now saw itself on the defensive and under attack by the government. That was brought those people into the political process.

— Paul Weyrich

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 7, The Rise of Conservatism (Con't)

... the have-nots are gaining steadily more political power to distribute the wealth downward. The masses have turned to a larger government.

— Notes from meeting of corporate executives, 1974 - 1975, plotting political strategy

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 7, The Rise of Conservatism (Con't)

It is completely apparent now that the women's lib movement means government-financed abortions, government-supported day care and lesbians teaching in our schools.

— Phyllis Schlafly

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 7, The Rise of Conservatism (Con't)

They may call it the new South, but as far as I'm concerned they still vote like the old South. These are the same states that voted to keep slavery.

— Karen DeCrow on the states that didn't ratify the ERA

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 7, The Rise of Conservatism

No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.... The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.

— Future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, 1971

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 6: Lesbian & Gay Rights in the 1970s (Con't)

As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by implying that Joan's history in the world ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there. It was necessary by hook or crook to shew the canonized Joan as well as the incinerated one; for many a woman has got herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt into the drawing-room fireplace, but getting canonized is a different matter, and a more important one. So I am afraid the epilogue must stand.

— George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Saint Joan (1923)

A note of explanation for this one: I used it to introduce the final section of the Harvey Milk section of the lecture, talking about his reputation after the immediate post-assassination events (i.e. after the White Night Riots).

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 6: Lesbian & Gay Rights in the 1970s (Con't)

If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.

— Harvey Milk, in a recording made November 18, 1977, "to be played only in the event of my death by assassination"

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 6: Lesbian & Gay Rights in the 1970s (Con't)

Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person, who all the sudden realizes that she or he is gay; knows that if the parents find out, they will be tossed out of the house, the classmates will torture the child, and the Anita Bryants and John Briggs are doing their bit on TV. And that child has several options: staying in the closet; suicide... And then one day that child might open up the paper and it says “Homosexual elected in San Francisco” and there are two new options: [an] option is to go to California; or to stay in San Antonio and fight. Two days after I was elected I got a phone call, and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said “Thanks”. And you’ve got to elect gay people, so that that young child, and the thousands upon thousands like that child, know that there's hope for a better world, there's hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those blacks, the Asians, the disabled, seniors — the “us”-s; the “us”-s : without hope the “us”-s give up. I know that you can’t live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, you've got to give them hope.

— Harvey Milk, 1978 (from his famous “hope” speech)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 6: Lesbian & Gay Rights in the 1970s (Con't)

Woman-identified lesbianism is, then, more than a sexual preference, it's a political choice.

— The Furies, 1972

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 6: Lesbian & Gay Rights in the 1970s

But lesbianism is also different from male homosexuality, and serves a different function in the society. "Dyke" is a different kind of put-down from "faggot", although both imply you are not playing your socially assigned sex role. . . are not therefore a "real woman" or a "real man. " The grudging admiration felt for the tomboy, and the queasiness felt around a sissy boy point to the same thing: the contempt in which women-or those who play a female role-are held.

— Radicalesbians, "The Woman Identified Woman" (1970)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s (Con't)

The shifting evangelical position on abortion: Three quotes

God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.

— Christianity Today, 1968

And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is not further injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

— Exodus 21:22-25, New American Standard Bible, 1977 edition (emphasis added)

If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide.

— Exodus 21:22, New American Standard Bible, 1995 edition (emphasis added)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s (Con't)

Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.

— Robin Morgan (1974)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

A Brief Note on the Right's New Piketty Panic

We're beginning to see a real right-wing pushback on Piketty.  (See, for instance, the links discussed here* and here.)

The reason is simple, I think: the 1% — or, if you prefer, the 0.01% — understand power better than the rest of us.

Really gut-level understand it.

That's why they're scared.

They get, in a way that we don't, that we could just retake their ill-gotten gains.

If we chose to.

____________________________
* Krugman is, of course, doing the columnist equivalent of sub-tweeting — sub-columning? — his colleague Ross Douthat, because of the Times' policy of not allowing their columnists to address each other.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s (Con't)

Will the scientists and women's liberationists be able to unleash on the world a generation of kinless children to serves as the Red Guards of a totalitarian state?

— George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (1973)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s (Con't)

What about the rights of a woman who doesn't want to be treated like a man?

— Phyllis Schafly, "The Right to Be a Woman" (1972)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s (Con't)

The more radical feminists today insist that mothers have exactly as much right as fathers do to work full time outside the home... babies and young children have needs and rights too.

— Benjamin Spock, 1970

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s (Con't)

The working mother has no 'wife' to care for her children.

—Myra Wolfgang, 1970

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s (Con't)

Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature.

— Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 5: Gender, Sex and Family: Changes in the 1970s

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

—Thurgood Marshall, Stanley v. Georgia (1969)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 4, Struggles Over Race & Gender in the 1970s

In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white and one black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.

— Thurgood Marshall, dissent in Milliken (1974)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 3, The Economic Crisis of the 1970s (Con't)

We are aware, as never before, of distinct limits on our material resources. Abundance no longer seems to be our special defining characteristic as a nation.

— Lawrence Veysey (1979)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 3, The Economic Crisis of the 1970s

The continuous readjustment of expectations—downward: that was a key experience of the 1970s.

— Rick Perlstein

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 2, 1973 - 1974: "America's Nervous Breakdown" (Con't)

“This has been a good year.” Or, “This has been a bad year, right?” What sorts of statements are these? What consensus could there be on a year’s goodness? I think of early medieval annals. “721 AD–drought; 722 AD–(blank); 723 AD–(blank); 724 AD–(blank); 725 AD–bad harvest, frightening comet in the west.” Poor helpless humanity.... All years are terrible years; the predicament of being human tends towards the negative. We read the news and are left feeling nothing more noble than “only I have escaped to tell thee.” A given year can be pronounced good only in a solipsistic sense.

— Teju Cole, "Envoi" (2013)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 2, 1973 - 1974: "America's Nervous Breakdown"

There is already some talk about what "the historians will say" — the historians, those unknown people who in the future will have the franchise to interpret what is going on now. We tend to assume that out of their years of accumulation of fact they will sift the truth—a truer truth than any we can hope to grasp. They will have many more facts. And they will have what is called "perspective" (which means they will not be trapped in the biases of our day and can freely write in the biases of their day—can find what they are looking for). But I wonder if they will really understand what it was like. Will they know how it felt to go through what we have gone through? Will they know how it felt to be stunned—again and again—as we learned what had been done by people in power? Will they know how it felt to be shocked, ashamed, amused by the revelations—will they understand the difficulty of sorting out the madcap from the macabre? (What, for example, was one really to think about someone in the pay of the White House putting on a red wig and traveling across the country to visit a sick, disgraced lobbyist?) Can they conceivably understand how it felt as we watched on our television screen, our President say, "I am not a crook"? Will they be able to understand why, almost two years ago, some very sensible people wondered whether it was the last election? Will they understand how it felt—as it did last fall at the time the President fired Special Prosecutor Cox, and on several later occasions—when it seemed that there were no checks on power? Will they understand how degrading it was to watch a President being run to ground? Will they know how it was to feel in the thrall of this strange man, who seemed to answer only to himself? Knowing the conclusion, as they will, will they understand how difficult, frightening, and fumbling the struggle really was?

— Elizabeth Drew, "A Reporter in Washington D.C. III-Summer Notes"
The New Yorker, October 28, 1974 (in an entry dated August 8, 1974)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 1, Introduction (Con't)

There are few statements that can be made about America whose contradictions are not almost equally true.

—Godfrey Hodgson

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 1, Introduction

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

— L. P. Hartley

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

— William Faulkner

 Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Introduction

This semester I've been teaching an upper-level history course (called "Contemporary History") which covers the history of this country from 1973 through the present.  (If I decide to get all meta, I'll make the last fact I mention the fact that they are listening to the last fact I mention.)  The course is primarily a lecture course: I'm assigning eight books, and for each book we're having a class discussion, but otherwise I'm narrating a story.

To help them follow, I've been giving out outlines of my lectures, including key names, dates, etc: the idea is that way they aren't scrambling to get down those facts, but can listen to the ideas and narrative around them.  Who knows how much it helps.

At any rate, on the very first sheet (for the introductory lecture, laying out course themes, the problematics of contemporary history, and stuff like that) I put down a few quotes at the end of the outline and labeled them "commonplace book".  (This is the reference; see also here and here)  I didn't discuss them, but just threw them in.

Well, the practice quickly expanded. I started throwing in quotes I actually wanted to discuss, so they had them in front of them (for the same reasons that I was giving them the outline).  I also continued to throw in some quotes I didn't discuss (either ones that I didn't intend to discuss, or simply ones I didn't have time to discuss).  Most quotes were directly from or about the period or topic of the lecture, but some were thematic or associatal.

Anyway, I've decided, both because I think they're interesting and because this blog has been far too quiescent lately, to start posting them.  For the most part, I intend to post one per day, which mean that some lectures' quotes will go on for more than a week.  (The only case in which I intend to deviate from this is when I deliberately paired two quotes to work against each other, as I did sometimes; then I'll put up both in the same post.)

In the interest of both honesty and not going completely bugfuck insane, I'm going to strictly post only those I handed out to my students on the day of the lecture: I won't add or subtract to them.  No new finds or second thoughts.  The one exception to this: in some cases I would repeat quotes on the next handout, either if I hadn't gotten to it in the first lecture on whose handout it appeared,* or, more rarely, if I wanted to remind students of it.  In these cases, I won't repeat the quote, but will include it with the lecture where (to the best of my recollection) I actually discussed it — usually the second set, but occasionally the first.**

Finally, since these quotes will reflect the course's lectures, which are a key part, but only a part, of the class, I want to list the eight books I assigned here.  They include books on key topics I didn't lecture on (or didn't lecture sufficiently on).  I wouldn't choose the exact same books if I taught the course again, but I do think that most of them worked well, and that they, collectively, provided a very good introduction to the history of the period.  Anyway, enough apologetics: here they are:

1. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
2. Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End
3. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture
4. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
5. Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet
6. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
7. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
8. Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

The first quote will go up tomorrow morning — or, actually, the first quotes, since the first are a pair meant to work against each other.

I hope you enjoy them.

Update: to see all quote thus far posted, read this tag.

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 * Sadly common: I always hoped to cover more than I actually could.

** Except that, even here, in a few cases I considered the beginning of the next lecture to be "really" part of the next one... I guess all I can say is: if I repeated a quote, I'll only post it once, in the lecture that makes the most sense to me.  There won't be any revisionism about what quotes I included, but there might be a tiny bit regarding when they got talked about.