…should be your writing prejudices. Check them out.
(They remind me that I need an editor sometimes.)
I had always thought of "The Wizard of Oz" as a fairy tale (or as the video for "Dark Side of the Moon").
In fact, it is an allegory of…bimetallism?
Read on…
(Warning! Simplifications ahead!)
In the 19th century, the United States was on the gold standard, which meant that gold was used as official currency, and that gold backed up the paper money that the United States Treasury issued (in other words, you could go to the local U. S. Treasury office, give them a dollar bill, and get a dollar's worth of gold for it). The "real" value of a country's currency (as opposed to its paper value) was ultimately limited to the value of the gold that that country had in its treasury.
In 1893, an economic depression began in the United States that would last until 1898. During the depths of this depression, millions of Americans (including one Frank Baum) passionately advocated one proposed economic solution: inflating the value of the currency by using silver as well as gold as money; or, "bimetallism".
Silver sentiment had grown swiftly after 1894, sweeping through the South and West […] Pro-silver literature flooded from presses and filled newspaper columns. […] People read, discussed, and believed. […] During 1896 unemployment shot up; farm income and prices fell to the lowest point in the decade. […] Silverites offered a solution, simplistic but compelling: the free and independent coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1.
[…] The ratio of 16 to 1 pegged silver's value at 16 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold […]. The silverites believed in a quantity theory of money: the amount of money in circulation determined the level of activity in the economy. […] Silver meant prosperity. Added to the currency, it would swell the money stock and quicken the pace of economic activity. […]
[…] Frank Baum, a silverite from Chicago, [wrote] an enduring allegory of the silver movement, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dorothy (every person) is carried from drought-stricken Kansas to a strange land of riches and witches. On arrival, she disposes of one witch, the Wicked Witch of the East (with obvious symbolism [the most powerful supporters of the gold standard were on the East Coast]), and frees the Munchkins (the common people) from servitude. To return to Kansas, Dorothy must go to the Emerald City (the national capital, greenback-colored).
She wears silver slippers and follows the yellow brick road, thus achieving a proper parity between silver and gold. A kiss from the good Witch of the North (northern voters) protects her on the way. She meets the Scarecrow (the farmer), who has been told he has no brain, but actually possesses great common sense; the Tin Woodman (the industrial worker), who fears he has become heartless, but discovers the spirit of love and cooperation; and the Cowardly Lion (reformers and politicians), who has lost the courage to fight. When the four companions reach the Emerald City, they find that the feared Wizard (the money power) is only a charlatan, a manipulator, whose power rests on myth and illusion. Dorothy unmasks the Wizard, destroys the wicked Witch of the West (those opposing progress there), and with the help of the good Witch of the South (obvious symbolism again), uses the silver slippers to return home to Kansas. Sadly the slippers are lost in flight. "Oz" was a familiar abbreviation to those involved in the 16 (ounces) to 1 fight.
-- R. Hal Williams, Years of decision: American politics in the 1890s, pgs 104-106.
So now I'm wondering…was Elton John's 1973 double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road really about President Nixon's 1971 decision to completely de-link the value of the American dollar from gold? And, if so, what is the allegorical interpretation of the song "Jamaica Jerk Off"?
Kevin Drum (CalPundit) notices how a key Bush administration phrase has evolved over the last year:
March 2003: Weapons of mass destruction.
June 2003: Weapons of mass destruction programs.
October 2003: Weapons of mass destruction-related programs.
January 2004: Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.
In 1996, Arizona voted for Bill Clinton in the general election, between voting for Bush 41 in 1992 and Bush 43 in 2000. At the time, some speculated that Arizona voters had been so alienated from Bob Dole by the negative television advertisements run by the Steve Forbes campaign in the Republican primary (which Forbes won) that they wouldn't vote for him even nine months later.
If Howard Dean wins the Democratic nomination, I wonder if he'll have a similar problem with Iowa? The state has voted for the Democratic candidate four times in a row, but Gore carried the state by only 4000 votes in 2000.
(For that matter, what would Iowans in the general election think of Wesley Clark as the presidential candidate? He didn't campaign in Iowa at all.)
The Dean campaign's Perfect Storm drizzled out tonight in Iowa. I think I know one reason why.
One year at Ohio State, an ideologically driven group went all-out to win the student government presidential race. It had money, it had organization, it had eager volunteers; on paper, it had a formidable campaign.
Its campaign had one fatal weakness, though: The volunteers were so focused on efficiently and passionately pushing their message that they didn't listen to the people they were talking at. They never noticed the effect their stridency had. The harder they tried, the more they hurt their cause.
Like Dean, this group's candidate team finished a distant third.
From what I've read, the Dean volunteers in Iowa were inspired and uplifted by the experience of sacrificing for a deeply felt common cause, and it pains me to fault their idealistic efforts. But I suspect that they (and Governor Dean) would have been better off if they had been inspired and uplifted instead by the experience of listening to and learning about the people of Iowa.
With his endorsement of Wesley Clark, George McGovern perhaps answers those who compare McGovern to Howard Dean.
Still, though, the similiarities between this account of the McGovern campaign in 1971 and what we've seen of the Dean campaign are interesting:
To run as an "insurgent," the term his aides use, McGovern must build his own organization, ferret out his own money supply, hopefully elbow out competition for the party's left and, with all this accomplished, show winning strength in the primaries. All this is based on the belief that a man from the party's left, playing to the public's yearning for an honest politician, can glue together a winning coalition of workers, farmers, students, minorities, academics, housewives and peace activists whom McCarthy and Kennedy split in 1968. If hard work is all that's needed to do it, McGovern can be counted on to put in the hours. He'll never be accused of "copping out".
Then why the doubts? Seldom have the prospects of a major contender—and, in the fall of 1971, McGovern must be accorded that designation—been haunted by so many phantoms. […Some] see a one-issue candidate, harping about a war that is fading from public consciousness. There are suspicions he's not the one to unite the left or to give it viability […]. To middle America he's all too often identified with the radical-chic establishment in the despised "East," if not with the bomb throwers. Some find him wanting because he doesn't "project" on "the media". In brief, George McGovern isn't "electible". […]
[…]
[…] McGovern's early decision to raise as much of his money as possible from small contributors is paying off—$600,000 thus far. Enough is pledged on a monthly basis ($30,000) to fund his headquarters operation, thus freeing him from total reliance on big money sources in the early stages of the campaign and making it possible for him to earmark big contributions for the long, costly primary season. […]
McGovern has clearly been helped by the dropout rate among left-of-center candidates—Hughes and Bayh, to be specific. To do well in the early primaries, McGovern will need to have the left side of the spectrum to himself, while Muskie occupies the middle and is besieged by one or more candidates on the right. […]
[…]
In the kind of multi-candidate situation which may arise in the early primaries, McGovern's hopes lie in the depth of commitment of his supporters and the strength of his organization. From what I've seen[,] their commitment and energy match his own and bring to mind the warning of Wisconsin's Don Peterson, a campaign aide to McGovern in one of his early races in South Dakota: "Everybody always underestimates George. Don't make that mistake."
-- from "The Workhorse Candidate: McGovern's Campaign", The New Republic, 30 October 1971, pgs 15-16, 20.
Future historians may well mark the mid-1980s as the time when Japan surpassed the United States to become the world's dominant economic power. [...] America's GNP may remain larger than Japan's well into the 1990s (depending on exchange rate measurements), but there are many reasons to believe that Japan will extend its lead as the world's dominant economic power in the years ahead.
-- Ezra F. Vogel, "Pax Nipponica?", Foreign Affairs, Spring 1986, pg 752.
According to the 2004 World Almanac, the United States in 2002 had a $10.4 trillion economy, while Japan had a $3.6 trillion economy, when measured in American dollars.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the American economy grew 57.5% (after adjusting for inflation) between 1986 and 2001, measured in American dollars. According to the Japan Statistical Yearbook 2004, the Japanese economy grew 42.5% (after adjusting for inflation) during the same time period, measured in Japanese yen.
At that rate, "America's GNP may remain larger than Japan's" well into the 2090s.
In 1971, The New Republic noted an aspect of George McGovern's personality that I see as the biggest difference between him and Howard Dean:
Next to his "radical" image, McGovern's biggest liability is the feeling he doesn't project strength, that he's a "provincial," that he doesn't possess a room when he walks in nor incite fear or unrest in his colleagues. The personal commitment is there. But is the tough negotiator in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation? Using the gavel doesn't seem to appeal to his innate sense of fairness. On TV, he's at his best when the cameras catch him in a rare moment of anger. In short, he comes across as decent but unobtrusive and uncommanding.
-- from "The Workhorse Candidate: McGovern's Campaign", The New Republic, 30 October 1971, pg 20.
His similes are terrible, but his points are good…
[T]he art critics and the dramatic critics [...] are separated by a great chasm of "culture" and fastidiousness from the people for whom they write. They [look upon] the amusements of the public, not as wine-tasters oversee wine-drinking, or horse-doctors inspect horses—that is, by right of knowing more than most people about something which most people know. Rather they oversee them as teetotalers count the [pubs], or as a giraffe, with lifted head, might oversee a fish-market. This division and disgust is a dangerous attitude, even when it is a right attitude; for there is in all arrogance the beginning of ignorance. [...] Obviously the right condition for a healthy community is that the people and the critics should have the same basic joy in beautiful or comic things; but that the people should not know why they feel the joy, while the critics should tell them. [...] As men they should laugh or cry at a theatre; and then afterwards, as critics, defend themselves for having done so. They should justify to the public its own feelings in the act of justifying their own. But [...] something has gone wrong with this natural relation of the critics to the commonwealth. The writers in question never attempt to explain why humanity likes this or that; generally they get no further than explaining why they do not like it themselves. [...] [A] critic, even if he differs from the [general opinion], ought to be able to explain it. That is his business.
-- G. K. Chesterton, 1909
Even after the slaughter of World War I, there could still be in 1937 an excessive faith in human progress:
Today, of course, we hardly know the meaning of the word "fear" in its medieval sense. Anesthetics have removed the fear of physical pain. Logic and intelligence have extinguished the fires of hell. We live in a world of such superabundance that the hideous nightmare of starvation no longer plagues us—or, at least, it should not. If all of us do not get enough to eat, we realize that it is the result of bad management and not the result of the actual absence of whatever we need. And as for the fear of foreign invasion—yes, such a thing is still possible, but even during the Great War, which was not exactly fought in what one might call a "gentlemanly spirit," no country suffered any of the horrors which up to a few hundred years ago were connected with the idea of an invasion by a hostile army. Here and there a few citizens might be inadvertently killed, but there was no question of exterminating the whole population or of selling hundreds of thousands of women and children into slavery, and even those cities which suffered most were carefully rebuilt as soon as peace had been signed.
-- Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Arts, pg. 146.
Three years after van Loon wrote this passage, he watched from New York as German armies invaded his homeland, the Netherlands, levelling Rotterdam, the city of his birth, as they advanced. During the five years of German occupation, tens of thousands of Dutch Jews were enslaved and/or exterminated, and the Dutch people suffered starvation and privation in the "hunger winter" of 1944-45.
Van Loon died in 1944. After the invasion, he never saw his beloved Zeeland again.
This is tragedy; the hubristic brought low; almost an ancient Greek play brought to life.
There are people who say that 9/11 "changed the world forever". These people know very little about the world.
The controversy over whether Howard Dean is another George McGovern and the endorsement of Joe Lieberman by The New Republic has inspired me to dig up some of what The New Republic wrote in 1971 and 1972 about George McGovern's presidential campaign.
Looking at contemporary writings can be interesting, because they can tell you what people were thinking when they didn't know what we know now (or when they knew things which we've forgotten). For example, in 1971, the name "George McGovern" did not connote "49-state loser", and people thought of McGovern in a different way than we do now: As a respected two-term United States Senator, and the architect of the South Dakota Democratic Party.
In this excerpt from the lead editorial of The New Republic after McGovern officially began his campaign in January 1971, you can see some similarities between the nascent McGovern campaign and the Dean campaign of several months ago:
Announcing his candidacy last week, McGovern said: "We must have the courage to admit that however sincere our motives, we made a dreadful mistake in trying to settle the affairs of the Vietnamese people with American troops and bombers. . . . There is now no way to end it and to free our prisoners except to announce a definite, early date for the withdrawal of every American soldier. I make that pledge without reservation." Vietnam is one of various controversies on which the Senator from South Dakota has taken a position "without reservation." It is his strength, because the old equivocations are sterile; it is his weakness, because again last week the Democratic Party, in the House of Representatives, showed how unready it is to become a modern party, one that commands the confidence of a disaffected and independent-minded new generation.
At first glance, McGovern's move appears audacious. Not because Mr. Nixon is invincible; on the contrary, he is highly vulnerable. The cities are getting sicker; the war has widened (though American casualities have declined); blacks and whites, young and not-so-young are at odds; unemployment and inflation are rising; and by such nominations as those of Carswell and Haynsworth, the President has lost credit even with conservatives, who were offended by his disregard for quality and his having played Southern politics with the highest tribunal. It takes no audacity to challenge Mr. Nixon. But it takes some daring for a Democrat in January of 1971 to take on Senator Muskie (and in the New Hampshire primary, too), for Muskie has been chosen by the polls and most political writers, prematurely we think, as the certain consensus candidate.
McGovern today is somewhat reminiscent of candidate Estes Kefauver in 1952. They start from behind the goal, they must maneuver end runs around the conventional power blocs and public opinion makers, so as to get to the voters themselves. They don't expect to be carried along by charisma. They gather force and following by demonstrations of concern for people and by highmindedness. Now of course, no Democrat who has twice been elected to the House of Representatives and twice to the United States Senate from Republican South Dakota is a barefoot boy, and McGovern is not. But it is one of his attractions that he looks nonprofessional. To many Americans, "politician" has come to signify self-seeking guile, which they distrust. Whether the distrust is a bit of folk wisdom or plain ignorance is beside the point. It is an asset of McGovern's that he conveys a disinterested dedication, the sort that leads a man to step in where more circumspect colleagues fear to tread.
-- from "The Audacity of George McGovern", The New Republic, 30 January 1971, pgs 7-8.
More to follow.
Over at 2 Blowhards, Michael Blowhard describes what he sees as "the difference between the movie-person's view of the world and the book-person's view of the world":
[F]or the sake of this discussion, I don't mean book fans. I mean people who spend a hunk of their professional lives in the books world -- as agents, retailers, critics, editors, writers, designers, etc.
[...]
Practically speaking, many people who join the books world do so because they're scholarly and quiet sorts. You won't find many movie professionals who spend a lot of time regretting that they left academia, or who went into the moviebiz hoping to find a quiet refuge from the stresses of business, ambition, competition, chores, and sex. But you'll find a lot of such people in the book world.
Also, the simple fact is that, for many people, books equal school -- while movies represent weekends, vacation, time off, romance and sex. And so life in the books world is for many books pros a way of trying to continue living life as though in school. [...]
As a consequence, the books world has a quiet-study-and-thought-at-war-with-everyday-distractions feeling. IMHO, many of the characteristics, and many of the endlessly recycled arguments and discussions that preoccupy bookworld people -- standards at war with money; the way striving for the good becomes a matter of holding the world at bay; a dreamy leftism -- can be explained from this simple fact: many books people are bugged by life outside of school. They wish life were like school. They were happy in school, and they did well there. Money, business, leaky roofs -- it all interferes with how they want to live, buried in their books. They feel put-upon by life [...]
I can't deny that the man has a point.
Dylan Wilbanks takes a look at the current state of American political discourse, and says one thing I strongly agree with (though I would quibble with "impossible"):
I believe political discourse is now impossible in this country, thanks to the media, the bevy of talk-show moruns [sic] out there, and a bunch of writers too lazy to write an interesting and factual column. It's sad when bloggers on both sides have a better grasp on political ideas than the mainstream media.
I rarely read political columnists any more (and I certainly don't bother with political news on television). The political bloggers I read are more honest and more to the point, and rarely waste my time.
The Westminster Gazette [...] remarked that one particular play, produced by Mr. George Edwardes, had not a very good libretto. [...] Mr. Edwardes [retorted] that the Westminster Gazette criticism was obviously inspired by malice and spite. Now this is a smashing test; this is always the thing that people say when they have literally nothing else to say. If a critic tells a particular lie, that particular lie can be pointed out. If he misses a specific point, that point can be explained. If he is really wrong in this or that, it will be on this or that that the insulted person will eagerly pounce. But "malice and spite" are vague words which will never be used except when there is really nothing to pounce on. If a man says that I am a dwarf, I can invite him to measure me. If he says I am a cannibal, I can invite him to dinner. If he says I am a coward, I can hit him. [...] But if he says I am fat and lazy (which is true), the best I can answer is that he speaks out of malice and spite. Whenever we see that phrase, we may be almost certain that somebody has told the truth about somebody else.
-- G. K. Chesterton, 1909
Josh Marshall excerpts an interview with Peter Drucker, who argues that India will be a greater economic power in the future than China.
I've long believed that India rather than China would be the nation to eventually supplant the United States as the world's leading superpower, for three reasons:
First (as Drucker notes), English is a main language in India, which would make a transition from American primacy to Indian primacy easier (just as the British to American transfer was aided by a common English language, and the French to British transfer was aided by a common knowledge of French).
Second, India has maintained the British legacy of democracy and relative freedom and tolerance, which, combined with the recent loosening of state controls on the economy, makes India more likely to foster innovation and change than China.
(A side note…Notice what kinds of work have been subcontracted to the two countries: China is best known for its industrial production; India for its software writing and technical support. Which country is more likely to become an economic leader: One which produces commodities or one which produces creative work?)
Third, because of the two reasons already stated, Americans would be more comfortable ceding leadership to the Indians -- people with whom we have important attributes in common -- than we would to China (which is not to say we'd like ceding leadership, any more than the British liked what happened between 1870 and 1945). In fact, I don't think the United States would step aside for China without being forced to by warfare.
In the aftermath of 9/11, I wondered if we would see a global re-configuration of alliances, with the United States and India against China and the Islamic world, with the European Union and Russia wavering in the middle (or possibly forming a lesser bloc of their own). That exact re-configuration seems less likely to me now, but I do believe that interesting times are ahead.