yet more books i read lately
Aug. 24th, 2023 04:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaDNF: Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality by Lily Geismer
I thought this book would make a good follow-up to Reaganland, in my very vague continuing quest to Understand The Post-WWII Presidencies, and also I liked the New Republic article about it.
And this book was pretty entertaining/informative in some respects. The author spends a lot of time detailing the Clinton administration's mania for "microfinance" programs, which did have some successes in the 80s and early 90s. (You know, those programs that offer quick & easy tiny loans to, say, women in Bangladesh, who use that seed money to get a sewing machine, so they can make goods to sell from home, which—hopefully—nets them long-term financial independence.) While I already knew about the dude who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering this in Bangladesh, I hadn't heard the story of ShoreBank, which had great success revitalizing the historically black South Shore of Chicago via a similar microloan system. The economics were a little different—you need a larger loan to do anything effective in Chicago as compared to Dhaka, even if it's still small in relative terms, and also, the primary investment vehicle for South Shore creditors was e.g. using the funds to fix up or renovate some decaying old property, rather than independently making textile or craft goods. But it did legitimately strengthen the community, in a way that led to modest-but-real financial success for ShoreBank—a lot of their model assumed there was valuable human capital that had gone underinvested in due to racism and redlining, a model that turned out to be correct—so, y'know, good on them for their success.
The mistake comes, however, when the dweeby Ivy League types in the Clinton administration naively assume this sort of solution will work for every kind of economic woe . Clinton launches a microfinance in his own state of Arkansas while governor, and it's just painful to watch that play out. Both Bangladesh and Chicago had a lot of human capital that wasn't being utilized for very stupid, annoying reasons that could be fixed by "just introduce some more damn cash flow into the system." Arkansas, by contrast, is largely rural; the higher cost-of-living in the US means that making random goods out of your house just doesn't net the kind of returns that will pull you out of poverty; and the second the nearby factory opens up a second shift, the obvious thing to do is go get that second shift. But Clinton's blind to these crucial differences; he just wants so badly to have found this silver bullet that fixes everything—the creditors make money and also the debtors gain financial independence and also it doesn't even cost the government much of anything, easy win/win/win!
(Also the obsession with entrepreneurship is something I just find kinda creepy, personally. I see this come up a lot in certain policy spheres, and certain hustle-culture-y spheres—in particular, I just reread some old blog post from November 2016 earlier this week, in which a CS professor was talking about how they need to "encourage & teach students to become more entrepreneurial, so that they won't be aggrieved and lost when they're out of a job," as a way to combat rising right-wing discontent, and—oh my god. What. I forgot that was a thing people were saying in 2016. And a professor of all people! Kind of rich to say that while you're still pulling in your tenure salary from a very old & established institution with hundreds and hundred of employees, right?)
Anyway, other case studies follow, illustrating the shortcomings of the Clinton's administration's turn toward "doing well by doing good"—seeking these kinds of easy win/win scenarios in places where they can't really exist. There's a goofy system for clothing manufacturers to self-regulate in a way that lacks teeth; there's some horrific mismanagement of some urban housing projects; there's Reed Hastings, that phantom of the charter school movement, haunting the pages here; and so on. I was quite near the end of this book when I gave up—it's really quite in-the-weeds, which is probably good for Geismer's intended audience, but if you're wanting a higher-level picture of the Clinton years, it's too zoomed-in.
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
In my high school US history class, our textbook painted Woodrow Wilson as a doomed-but-noble figure: the man who believed and fought so hard for the League of Nations and Literal World Piece, but was besieged by nemeses on all sides. The fight for the Treaty of Versailles was literally the death of him, and he never lived to see the US join the League—nor did he see the League's utter failure to prevent WWII. Sad, beautiful, dignified.
Hochschild's portrait is, well, quite the opposite of that.
It wasn't a total shock to me that Wilson was shitty, to be clear. I was familiar with his vigorous efforts to re-segregate the civil service, and his affection for Birth of a Nation, also known as The Movie Where The Literal KKK Are The Heroes.
But Wilson's failures go so much further than that. Instead of a wise figure who the other quarreling nations failed to listen to, we see a politician who steadfastly refuses to play politics, even when it's plainly crucial. For instance: when he shows up in Europe to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, at first the other delegations are glad to see him—but, as their (extensively & delightfully quoted) catty notes to each other reveal, it quickly becomes clear that Wilson has done no advance research, has done nothing to win the favor of any of the nations, and seems to expect everyone to respect him & sort out their differences simply because he's... there? ("He was not accustomed to confer with equals.")
The man was elected via a storm of left-wing fervor—only to crack down ferociously on labor unions and perceived dissent the second he entered WWI. Or, well—rather, he let his subordinates get ferocious. Say you've got a bored general, back from the Philippine-American War, mad as hell that he can't go fight in Europe properly—so you ask Wilson if you might set up an intelligence agency, a federal one even, that tries out some of those extra-brutal techniques you learned during the last war against the US's own citizens? Yeah, Wilson would let you do that, no problem, and if there's not great evidence there's a ton of domestic German spies, or people start complaining about their civil liberties... shrug. The most severe Wilson ever gets with any of his subordinates is vague little suggestions, stuff to the effect of "it's not very good form for you to be doing [x] right now," when [x] included things like, I dunno, the postmaster general shutting down thousands of independent newspapers across the country for breathing protest against WWI from time to time? Ugh. The burnished image I got of Wilson in my high school textbook seems to be the product of some good old fashioned Hollywood engineering ("a lavish whitewash in Technicolor that won five Oscars," closely supervised by his widow, Edith).
So yeah, this is a book about Wilson, but more specifically, Hochschild's interested in the origin of the US's federal surveillance state, which he traces specifically to the jingoistic mania that Wilson tolerated & often stoked during the course of WWI.
Hochschild is an excellent storyteller and I can't possibly relate all his stuff here. Suffice to say there's a beautiful and admirable bit about Louis F. Post, a bureaucrat with an actual spine who winds up toppling some of the worst excesses of the administration with a mixture of cleverness and courage, and also several rowdy-ass western women who stir up all kinds of trouble in their determination to speak out loudly & proudly against the war, and an incredible trial of a bunch of Wobblies, and a pretty sobering and chilling account of the East Saint Louis race riots, and some truly batshit arrests (one dude's arrested just for attending a lecture were allegedly-disloyal things were said), and some godawful treatment of conscientious objectors, and Eugene V Debs and EMMA GOLDMAN and...
In ways I found it encouraging—the US shook off its mania after the close of the war, and most everyone who'd been unjustly imprisoned was eventually released, and Harding did a great deal to chill Americans out again. Even when things seem unimaginably bleak, when the country's gone off the deep end and forgotten her Constitution and any sense of goodness and justice... things can go back. Manias can pass.
But of course, in other ways I found it deeply sobering. Not just because of things like all the years those unjustly-imprisoned men and women lost of their lives, months of years in prison they never got back. But because of the things that didn't fade, after the mania passed. Hochschild points out that one of the anti-immigration laws passed during the heat of war fever was the very law that turned away thousands upon thousands of the Jews fleeing Europe at the dawn of WWII. Fuck. God.
Anyway, this book was a great read and I learned a lot, here's some choice quotes I posted to Tumblr
DNF: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
I read the bulk of this over my honeymoon. Which sure was, uh, a choice :D;;;
I picked this up at a local bookstore when it was featured in their "Classics of SF" book club, because I was disappointed that I'd never even heard of it—first published in 1976, it's considered a classic of both SF/utopian fiction and feminist fiction.
In brief: it's 1976, and Connie Ramos has been unjustly committed to a mental health ward in NYC due to Institutional Fuckery. While there, we get both a vivid portrait of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-level fuckery that is The World Of 1970s Mental Health Care—and also, Connie starts receiving messages/visions frome one "Luciente," a person living in Mattapoisett in the year 2137, who's reaching out to her with special future-technology.
And what a future Luciente lives in. It's definitely capital-U Utopian, and there's something charmingly 70s-hippie-antiestablishment about it. Like, you know that one Sex-Positive Lefty Aunt who composts all her food and tells you about why you should use those sponge things instead of normie menstrual products and is so delighted with how many of her clothes she's been able to make herself? She would absolutely create a place like Mattapoissett. (Not that I have that aunt personally, mine, but I borrowed one at a housemate's family's Thanksgiving once; she was a hoot.)
So parts of that vision are just lovely (its portrait of what humane mental health care would look like just fills you with longing, especially seeing as it's directly juxtaposed against the absolute hell Connie is going through), and parts reflect the now-somewhat-dated anxieties of their time (there's that uncomfortable touch of neo-Malthusianism when the future-people are peacocking over their clever and careful measures for controlling the size of the population), and, of course, a couple things that are just goofy.
Like, one of the funniest elements was the way culture is treated in this book—Luciente's village is Wampanoag, but that doesn't mean the villagers are descended from the Wampanoag, or that they have tribal membership, or anything like that. Instead, each village in this world has its own culture, and at their founding they just kinda... pick... one? So their village is Wampanoag, and does Wampanoag coming-of-age rituals and ceremonies and stuff like that, but the next village over is Harlem Black, and they do stuff associated with that culture, completely irrespective of their own race/ethnicity/background/whatever. Connie finds this strange, but Luciente's reply is something to the effect of, "well, we eliminated racism, so of course there's no reason we can't pick any culture we like."
(And this is why I'm such a bad reader of utopian fiction, haha, and prefer the utopia-measured-with-realism of, say, Le Guin's Anarres. I see that on the page and I just start twitching like, wait, culture isn't a fixed thing, it's a thing that shapes and is shaped by the people enacting it, and while you can certainly preserve or revive old traditions and integrate them into a present culture, trying to recreate an old thing and fix it in place doesn't work; you'd end up with nothing more than a glorified Williamsburg, how does this even work—)
ANYWAY. What hasn't aged at all, and is indeed heartbreakingly relevant, is Piercy's portrait of our protagonist. Connie Ramos is tough, smart, and savvy—for all the good that's done her, which isn't much. Her family immigrated to NYC from Mexico, and they're desperately poor, but with determination and grit, she was able to make it to college. Except: then she got pregnant, had to drop out. She gets married, has the kid, but husband beats her. So she and the kid manage to make it out of there, only for her boss at her secretary-job to make a pass at her, and when she tries to turn him down nicely—yeah, she's fired. How the hell are you supposed to feed a kid without a job; it's not like that shitty ex-husband's helping at all. She gets a new boyfriend who actually loves her—Claud is great, we love Claud—except he's arrested for pickpocketing, and while in jail they test a new drug on him, and he ends up dying. Connie becomes so catastrophically depressed after all that (understandable), that she ends up using drugs, so she neglects her kid, and she's struggling like mad to hold down some jobs to cover the income Claud used to bring in, but shit is hard and when her kid ruins some shoes, the only shoes they could afford, Connie hits her kid the first and only time, and—then she's off to some foster family. Also Connie's niece is getting pimped out by her boyfriend, and said boyfriend is the lovely gentleman who got Connie committed at the start of the novel, by lying to some cops after he broke into Connie's apartment, officer she's crazy she came at me with that bottle out of nowhere—
God, it's so bleak typed out like that. And it is bleak. But it doesn't feel implausibly so—especially as the novel tells it, spooling out new information piece-by-piece. She's a believably amalgamation of what happens to a lot of tough, smart, and savvy people who had the misfortune of being born poor, and who hit maybe a few more unlucky breaks than most.
Piercy has a scorching-hot eye for justice; it radiates off every page where she's describing Connie's plight, and I respect that immensely. (You can feel it in the introduction to the current edition, too, where Piercy eviscerates the contemporary state of things—pointing out that simply throwing hands and failing to offer any mental health services at all is hardly an improvement on the 70s' awful status quo.)
That being said, I got distracted halfway through, picked the book up after a month or two away, and found myself right in the middle of yet another scene in the mental ward, where Connie's once again been placed due to monstrously unfair circumstances, and her fuckup of a niece is letting her down again for the... huh, how many times is this? and what's happening next?
So yeah, I felt like I'd gotten the picture at that point, and put the book down. But what clarity of vision; what an interesting kind of period piece.
I thought this book would make a good follow-up to Reaganland, in my very vague continuing quest to Understand The Post-WWII Presidencies, and also I liked the New Republic article about it.
And this book was pretty entertaining/informative in some respects. The author spends a lot of time detailing the Clinton administration's mania for "microfinance" programs, which did have some successes in the 80s and early 90s. (You know, those programs that offer quick & easy tiny loans to, say, women in Bangladesh, who use that seed money to get a sewing machine, so they can make goods to sell from home, which—hopefully—nets them long-term financial independence.) While I already knew about the dude who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering this in Bangladesh, I hadn't heard the story of ShoreBank, which had great success revitalizing the historically black South Shore of Chicago via a similar microloan system. The economics were a little different—you need a larger loan to do anything effective in Chicago as compared to Dhaka, even if it's still small in relative terms, and also, the primary investment vehicle for South Shore creditors was e.g. using the funds to fix up or renovate some decaying old property, rather than independently making textile or craft goods. But it did legitimately strengthen the community, in a way that led to modest-but-real financial success for ShoreBank—a lot of their model assumed there was valuable human capital that had gone underinvested in due to racism and redlining, a model that turned out to be correct—so, y'know, good on them for their success.
The mistake comes, however, when the dweeby Ivy League types in the Clinton administration naively assume this sort of solution will work for every kind of economic woe . Clinton launches a microfinance in his own state of Arkansas while governor, and it's just painful to watch that play out. Both Bangladesh and Chicago had a lot of human capital that wasn't being utilized for very stupid, annoying reasons that could be fixed by "just introduce some more damn cash flow into the system." Arkansas, by contrast, is largely rural; the higher cost-of-living in the US means that making random goods out of your house just doesn't net the kind of returns that will pull you out of poverty; and the second the nearby factory opens up a second shift, the obvious thing to do is go get that second shift. But Clinton's blind to these crucial differences; he just wants so badly to have found this silver bullet that fixes everything—the creditors make money and also the debtors gain financial independence and also it doesn't even cost the government much of anything, easy win/win/win!
(Also the obsession with entrepreneurship is something I just find kinda creepy, personally. I see this come up a lot in certain policy spheres, and certain hustle-culture-y spheres—in particular, I just reread some old blog post from November 2016 earlier this week, in which a CS professor was talking about how they need to "encourage & teach students to become more entrepreneurial, so that they won't be aggrieved and lost when they're out of a job," as a way to combat rising right-wing discontent, and—oh my god. What. I forgot that was a thing people were saying in 2016. And a professor of all people! Kind of rich to say that while you're still pulling in your tenure salary from a very old & established institution with hundreds and hundred of employees, right?)
Anyway, other case studies follow, illustrating the shortcomings of the Clinton's administration's turn toward "doing well by doing good"—seeking these kinds of easy win/win scenarios in places where they can't really exist. There's a goofy system for clothing manufacturers to self-regulate in a way that lacks teeth; there's some horrific mismanagement of some urban housing projects; there's Reed Hastings, that phantom of the charter school movement, haunting the pages here; and so on. I was quite near the end of this book when I gave up—it's really quite in-the-weeds, which is probably good for Geismer's intended audience, but if you're wanting a higher-level picture of the Clinton years, it's too zoomed-in.
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
In my high school US history class, our textbook painted Woodrow Wilson as a doomed-but-noble figure: the man who believed and fought so hard for the League of Nations and Literal World Piece, but was besieged by nemeses on all sides. The fight for the Treaty of Versailles was literally the death of him, and he never lived to see the US join the League—nor did he see the League's utter failure to prevent WWII. Sad, beautiful, dignified.
Hochschild's portrait is, well, quite the opposite of that.
It wasn't a total shock to me that Wilson was shitty, to be clear. I was familiar with his vigorous efforts to re-segregate the civil service, and his affection for Birth of a Nation, also known as The Movie Where The Literal KKK Are The Heroes.
But Wilson's failures go so much further than that. Instead of a wise figure who the other quarreling nations failed to listen to, we see a politician who steadfastly refuses to play politics, even when it's plainly crucial. For instance: when he shows up in Europe to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, at first the other delegations are glad to see him—but, as their (extensively & delightfully quoted) catty notes to each other reveal, it quickly becomes clear that Wilson has done no advance research, has done nothing to win the favor of any of the nations, and seems to expect everyone to respect him & sort out their differences simply because he's... there? ("He was not accustomed to confer with equals.")
The man was elected via a storm of left-wing fervor—only to crack down ferociously on labor unions and perceived dissent the second he entered WWI. Or, well—rather, he let his subordinates get ferocious. Say you've got a bored general, back from the Philippine-American War, mad as hell that he can't go fight in Europe properly—so you ask Wilson if you might set up an intelligence agency, a federal one even, that tries out some of those extra-brutal techniques you learned during the last war against the US's own citizens? Yeah, Wilson would let you do that, no problem, and if there's not great evidence there's a ton of domestic German spies, or people start complaining about their civil liberties... shrug. The most severe Wilson ever gets with any of his subordinates is vague little suggestions, stuff to the effect of "it's not very good form for you to be doing [x] right now," when [x] included things like, I dunno, the postmaster general shutting down thousands of independent newspapers across the country for breathing protest against WWI from time to time? Ugh. The burnished image I got of Wilson in my high school textbook seems to be the product of some good old fashioned Hollywood engineering ("a lavish whitewash in Technicolor that won five Oscars," closely supervised by his widow, Edith).
So yeah, this is a book about Wilson, but more specifically, Hochschild's interested in the origin of the US's federal surveillance state, which he traces specifically to the jingoistic mania that Wilson tolerated & often stoked during the course of WWI.
Hochschild is an excellent storyteller and I can't possibly relate all his stuff here. Suffice to say there's a beautiful and admirable bit about Louis F. Post, a bureaucrat with an actual spine who winds up toppling some of the worst excesses of the administration with a mixture of cleverness and courage, and also several rowdy-ass western women who stir up all kinds of trouble in their determination to speak out loudly & proudly against the war, and an incredible trial of a bunch of Wobblies, and a pretty sobering and chilling account of the East Saint Louis race riots, and some truly batshit arrests (one dude's arrested just for attending a lecture were allegedly-disloyal things were said), and some godawful treatment of conscientious objectors, and Eugene V Debs and EMMA GOLDMAN and...
In ways I found it encouraging—the US shook off its mania after the close of the war, and most everyone who'd been unjustly imprisoned was eventually released, and Harding did a great deal to chill Americans out again. Even when things seem unimaginably bleak, when the country's gone off the deep end and forgotten her Constitution and any sense of goodness and justice... things can go back. Manias can pass.
But of course, in other ways I found it deeply sobering. Not just because of things like all the years those unjustly-imprisoned men and women lost of their lives, months of years in prison they never got back. But because of the things that didn't fade, after the mania passed. Hochschild points out that one of the anti-immigration laws passed during the heat of war fever was the very law that turned away thousands upon thousands of the Jews fleeing Europe at the dawn of WWII. Fuck. God.
Anyway, this book was a great read and I learned a lot, here's some choice quotes I posted to Tumblr
DNF: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
I read the bulk of this over my honeymoon. Which sure was, uh, a choice :D;;;
I picked this up at a local bookstore when it was featured in their "Classics of SF" book club, because I was disappointed that I'd never even heard of it—first published in 1976, it's considered a classic of both SF/utopian fiction and feminist fiction.
In brief: it's 1976, and Connie Ramos has been unjustly committed to a mental health ward in NYC due to Institutional Fuckery. While there, we get both a vivid portrait of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-level fuckery that is The World Of 1970s Mental Health Care—and also, Connie starts receiving messages/visions frome one "Luciente," a person living in Mattapoisett in the year 2137, who's reaching out to her with special future-technology.
And what a future Luciente lives in. It's definitely capital-U Utopian, and there's something charmingly 70s-hippie-antiestablishment about it. Like, you know that one Sex-Positive Lefty Aunt who composts all her food and tells you about why you should use those sponge things instead of normie menstrual products and is so delighted with how many of her clothes she's been able to make herself? She would absolutely create a place like Mattapoissett. (Not that I have that aunt personally, mine, but I borrowed one at a housemate's family's Thanksgiving once; she was a hoot.)
So parts of that vision are just lovely (its portrait of what humane mental health care would look like just fills you with longing, especially seeing as it's directly juxtaposed against the absolute hell Connie is going through), and parts reflect the now-somewhat-dated anxieties of their time (there's that uncomfortable touch of neo-Malthusianism when the future-people are peacocking over their clever and careful measures for controlling the size of the population), and, of course, a couple things that are just goofy.
Like, one of the funniest elements was the way culture is treated in this book—Luciente's village is Wampanoag, but that doesn't mean the villagers are descended from the Wampanoag, or that they have tribal membership, or anything like that. Instead, each village in this world has its own culture, and at their founding they just kinda... pick... one? So their village is Wampanoag, and does Wampanoag coming-of-age rituals and ceremonies and stuff like that, but the next village over is Harlem Black, and they do stuff associated with that culture, completely irrespective of their own race/ethnicity/background/whatever. Connie finds this strange, but Luciente's reply is something to the effect of, "well, we eliminated racism, so of course there's no reason we can't pick any culture we like."
(And this is why I'm such a bad reader of utopian fiction, haha, and prefer the utopia-measured-with-realism of, say, Le Guin's Anarres. I see that on the page and I just start twitching like, wait, culture isn't a fixed thing, it's a thing that shapes and is shaped by the people enacting it, and while you can certainly preserve or revive old traditions and integrate them into a present culture, trying to recreate an old thing and fix it in place doesn't work; you'd end up with nothing more than a glorified Williamsburg, how does this even work—)
ANYWAY. What hasn't aged at all, and is indeed heartbreakingly relevant, is Piercy's portrait of our protagonist. Connie Ramos is tough, smart, and savvy—for all the good that's done her, which isn't much. Her family immigrated to NYC from Mexico, and they're desperately poor, but with determination and grit, she was able to make it to college. Except: then she got pregnant, had to drop out. She gets married, has the kid, but husband beats her. So she and the kid manage to make it out of there, only for her boss at her secretary-job to make a pass at her, and when she tries to turn him down nicely—yeah, she's fired. How the hell are you supposed to feed a kid without a job; it's not like that shitty ex-husband's helping at all. She gets a new boyfriend who actually loves her—Claud is great, we love Claud—except he's arrested for pickpocketing, and while in jail they test a new drug on him, and he ends up dying. Connie becomes so catastrophically depressed after all that (understandable), that she ends up using drugs, so she neglects her kid, and she's struggling like mad to hold down some jobs to cover the income Claud used to bring in, but shit is hard and when her kid ruins some shoes, the only shoes they could afford, Connie hits her kid the first and only time, and—then she's off to some foster family. Also Connie's niece is getting pimped out by her boyfriend, and said boyfriend is the lovely gentleman who got Connie committed at the start of the novel, by lying to some cops after he broke into Connie's apartment, officer she's crazy she came at me with that bottle out of nowhere—
God, it's so bleak typed out like that. And it is bleak. But it doesn't feel implausibly so—especially as the novel tells it, spooling out new information piece-by-piece. She's a believably amalgamation of what happens to a lot of tough, smart, and savvy people who had the misfortune of being born poor, and who hit maybe a few more unlucky breaks than most.
Piercy has a scorching-hot eye for justice; it radiates off every page where she's describing Connie's plight, and I respect that immensely. (You can feel it in the introduction to the current edition, too, where Piercy eviscerates the contemporary state of things—pointing out that simply throwing hands and failing to offer any mental health services at all is hardly an improvement on the 70s' awful status quo.)
That being said, I got distracted halfway through, picked the book up after a month or two away, and found myself right in the middle of yet another scene in the mental ward, where Connie's once again been placed due to monstrously unfair circumstances, and her fuckup of a niece is letting her down again for the... huh, how many times is this? and what's happening next?
So yeah, I felt like I'd gotten the picture at that point, and put the book down. But what clarity of vision; what an interesting kind of period piece.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-24 05:17 pm (UTC)Hochschild's "Bury the Chains" has meant a lot to me. Good to know about this book too.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-24 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-27 03:47 pm (UTC)around here, where we get fed... not none, but far less of the US's propaganda, I was never given the impression that wilson's performance at the peace table wasn't about as ignorant and naïve as you'd expect from the leader of a nation that was firmly on the side of This Is None Of My Freaken Business for two years, but I've still always thought of his turning his back on the europeans as something sort of... emblematic of the dawning realizations and moods that would pepper the 1920s. that the Great War did not in fact solve politics forever and the authorities were right back to the same nationalism and revanchism that had gotten them into that mess in the first place and oh god oh fuck how long until we're staring down more of The Horrors, sod this I'm going to stop conforming to gender
but that's all to say, it's still news to me how little of wilson's shit the europeans were having at all, and perhaps I'm in for discovering that his handling of the peace talks was even MORE naïve and ignorant than I'd previously known. intriguing! and what can I say, I'm always down for tearing down the US's self-aggrandizing narratives,
no subject
Date: 2023-08-27 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-27 09:43 pm (UTC)such as:
-lol lmao andrew jackson drops off a cliff starting 2016
-teddy roosevelt and harry truman aren't nearly low enough for my tastes, but I guess all of their competition is other US presidents
-on the flipside I thought JFK would be a lot higher up; not because I think he super deserves it but because he gets So Much hype
-ronald reagan's ratings oscillate suspiciously wildly
-lol lmao bill clinton abruptly rising to #8 in 2015 only to plummet right back to #19 in 2016
-looks like the dead last place was originally most often given to warren g. harding before it started consistently going to james buchanan instead, although andrew johnson seems to be carving a spot at the bottom now
no subject
Date: 2023-08-29 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-28 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-29 12:41 pm (UTC)