Some time ago NewMexiKen began Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City
But if you haven’t read it, and you like your history laced with serial killers, then I urge you to pick it up. Subtitled Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Larson tells the story of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the mad doctor, serial killer than operated on its fringes. Fascinating reading.
(That’s two-and-a-half books in three days.)
In [Maureen] Dowd’s work, John Edwards is routinely “the Breck Girl” (five times so far—and counting), and Gore is “so feminized that he’s practically lactating.” Indeed, two days before we voted in November 2000, Dowd devoted her entire column, for the sixth time, to an imaginary conversation between Gore and his bald spot. “I feel pretty,” her headline said (pretending to quote Gore’s inner thoughts). That was the image this idiot wanted you carrying off to the voting booth with you! Such is the state of Maureen Dowd’s broken soul. And such is the state of her cohort.
And now, in the spirit of fair play and brotherhood, she is extending this type of “analysis” to Barack Obama. In the past few weeks, she has described Obama as “legally blonde” (in her headline); as “Scarlett O’Hara” (in her next column); as a “Dreamboy,” as “Obambi,” and now, in her latest absurd piece, as a “schoolboy” (text below). Do you get the feeling that Dowd may have a few race-and-gender issues floating around in her inane, tortured mind?
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David Brooks wonders aloud, and compellingly, if perhaps New Mexico governor Bill Richardson might somehow rise above the glamorously noisy H. Clinton/B. Obama fray and become the Democratic candidate for President. Here’s what [David] Brooks likes about [Bill] Richardson:
He’s down to earth, accessible, funny, and smart.
He is “the most experienced person running for president. He served in Congress for 14 years. He was the energy secretary (energy’s kind of vital).”
He is a “successful two-term governor who was re-elected with 69 percent of the vote in New Mexico, a red state. Moreover, he’s a governor with foreign policy experience. He was U.N. ambassador. He worked in the State Department. He’s made a second career of negotiating on special assignments with dictators like Saddam, Castro and Kim Jong Il. He negotiated a truce in Sudan.”
He is the only Democratic candidate who is “completely invulnerable on the tax cut issue.”
And most of all, Brooks writes, “he’s not a senator. Since 1961, 40 senators have run for president and their record is 0-40. A senator may win this year, but you’d be foolish to assume it.”
NewMexiKen is thinking that David Brooks saw my take on Richardson back in January.
Over the weekend NewMexiKen read Mayflower
Philbrick begins by retelling the story of the Pilgrims, their voyage on the Mayflower, and their colony at Plymouth. But he also tells the story of the people who were there to meet them and the interdependence that developed — and then collapsed. Subtitled A Story of Community, Courage, and War, the second half of the book describes King Philip’s War, Philip being the adopted Christian name for the Pokonokets sachem, a son of Massasoit. It was the deadliest war, proportionately, ever fought on American soil.
Egan’s book is subtitled The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Centered around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas, and particularly Boise City, Oklahoma, and Dalhart, Texas, Egan tells a half-dozen personal stories from the greatest environmental disaster in American history.
It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed, where Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, where German POWs were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons. Over the last half-century, towns have collapsed and entire counties have been all but abandoned to the old and the dying. Hurricanes that buried city blocks farther south, tornadoes that knocked down everything in their paths, grassfires that burned from one horizon to another— all have come and gone through the southern plains. But nothing has matched the black blizzards. American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster.
And the worst of it was man made.
But it’s the stories of the people where Egan excels; of lost jobs, lost farms, lost children, and lost hope. Even in the years before the drought and dust, life was tough.
In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel’s first job. She had to be there before the bell rang — five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way — to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. … After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day’s kindling — dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.
One of nine kids, Ike Osteen grew up in a dugout. A dugout is just that — a home dug into the hide of the prairie. The floor was dirt. Above ground, the walls were plank boards, with no insulation on the inside and black tarpaper on the outside. Every spring, Ike’s mother poured boiling water over the walls to kill fresh-hatched bugs. The family heated the dugout with cow chips, which burned in an old stove and left a turd smell slow to dissipate. The toilet was outside, a hole in the ground. Water was hauled in from a deeper hole in the ground.
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It’s the birthday of novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1948). She grew up on a Pueblo reservation, where her community was made up of matrilineal families: Women owned the houses and the fields and were the authority figures, and men did much of the child rearing. Her first novel, Ceremony (1977), was one of the first novels ever published by a Native American woman, and many critics consider it a masterpiece.
… of Penn Jillette. Penn of Penn & Teller is 52.
… of Adriana Barraza. The recent Academy Award nominee is 51 today.
Patsy Cline died in a plane crash on this date in 1963. She was 30. John Belushi was found dead from a drug overdose on this date in 1982. He was 33.
The Boston Massacre was on this date in 1770.
Teen girl #1: Okay. Maybe I’m, like, retarded for not knowing this, but…did you guys know that other countries have national anthems, too?
Teen girl #2: Duh! It’s the same song, in different languages!
–Bay Ridge
Overheard in New York [from last March]
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