Mar 23, 2010

Things Noted Here & There

by Cliopatria

Eric Alterman, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Kazin, Ann Little, Claire Potter, Ted Widmer, and Sean Wilentz reflect on the Obama administration's health care reform victory in the House of Representatives.

Willibald Sauerländer,"The Best Faces of the Enlightenment," NYRB, 8 April, reviews"Jean-Antoine Houdon: Die Sinnliche Skulptur," an exhibit at Montpellier's Musée Fabre. See also, the beautiful"Slide Show: Houdon's Sensuous Sculpture," NYRBlog, 19 March.

Jonathan Eig,"Fast Food That Won the West," WSJ, 20 March, reviews Stephen Fried's Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire that Civilized the Wild West.

Dave Stone,"Major New Russian Archive for World War II," The Russian Front, 22 March, invites discussion of the announcement of plans for a major new Russian archive of WWII material.

Edmund White,"The Strange Charms of John Cheever," NYRB, 8 April, reviews Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life, Cheever's Collected Stories and Other Writings, Cheever's Complete Novels: The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, Falconer, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, and Cheever's Fall River and Other Uncollected Stories, edited by Franklin H. Dennis.

Mary Jo Murphy,"Acid Test," NYT, 19 March, reviews Don Lattin's How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered In a New Age for America.

Jane Mayer,"Counterfactual," New Yorker, 29 March, torments Marc A. Thiessen's Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.

Tevi Troy,"Bush, Obama, and the Intellectuals," National Affairs, Spring, puts intellectuals' assessments of Bush and Obama in a survey of the intellectuals and the presidency since the New Deal. Troy served in the Bush White House and is the author of Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, and Technicians.

More Comments:

Chris Bray - 3/24/2010

Alan Grayson's legislation -- open Medicare to anyone who wants to buy into it -- solved a problem without the need for coercion. But coercion is so much more fun, so what the hell.

The militia thing is way more interesting and problematic than the Think Progress folks can imagine, if you can believe that a blog post wouldn't capture the full complexity of a historical example. But that militia bill created a narrow requirement for a particular class of people who were incorporated into the body of the state to perform a state function. They were required to arm themselves because, from time to time, they were soldiers. Totally different.

Jonathan Dresner - 3/24/2010

I'd have been happier with single-payer, too.

By the by, I thought this discussion of compulsion in purchasing was up your alley, with your interests in the early military.

Chris Bray - 3/24/2010

One day Doris Kearns Goodwin or Sean Wilentz will write something that doesn't give me a headache. The view of history as a steady march of progress, the worship of politicians -- it's all there:

"The domestic bills that we consider historic have had one thing in common: They have extended social or economic justice to the American people. Each of the 20th-century bills we remember did precisely that: Social Security, the civil-rights bill ending segregation, voting rights, fair housing, Medicare...By extending health care to almost all Americans as a right and not a privilege, this bill is indeed historic."

To compel someone to buy a private corporate product, on threat of punishment, is to extend a right to that thing? How absolutely pathetic.

Jonathan Dresner - 3/23/2010

An appropriate choice of words, under the circumstances!