Mister Fweem's Blog: Alas . . .

Slate announced today the winner (and runners up) in the significant objects competition withy co-hosted (or whatever) with significantobjects.com.

I did not win.

That's okay.

But I entered. That counts for something.

The Best Part

P. 62-63, Making of the President 1968, by Theodore H. White.

Somewhere out beyond the Alleghenies the old culture of America still persists -- people who think Boy Scouts are good, who believe that divorce is bad, who teach Bible classes on Sunday, enjoy church suppers, wash their children's mouths with soap to purge dirty words, who regard homosexuals as wicked, whose throat chokes up when the American flag is marched by on the Fourth of July. In its extravagant and hyperbolic form -- as in Barry Goldwater's cosmology of demons -- the old culture sees the Atlantic Seaboard, particularly the Boston-New York-Washington belt, as the locus of a vast and sinister intellectual conspiracy, a combination of capital and decadence, corrupting the moral fiber and legendary decencies of an earlier America.

The new culture, of which we shall talk later, is the child of prosperity and the past decade. Characterized by an exuberance of color, style, fashion, art and expression flowing from the enormous excess energies of American life, it defines itself best not by what it seeks but by its contempt and scorn of what the past has taught. Its thrust lies in the direction of liberties and freedom, but with an exaggerated quality of aggressive infantilism. In its exploration of the limits of sensibility, all laws, manners, more, institutions which restrict such areas of individual expression as drugs, sex, obscenities, and mob violence are generally held to be oppressive; and the greatest agent of oppression in the twentieth century is generally held to be the United States government. As parochial as the old culture, the new expressionist culture is as sure of its own moral superiority over the old as the old culture of its superiority over the new; and in its extreme and paranoid form the new culture is convinced of the conspiracy of a military-industrial complex pushing America to war and ruin as, say, the John Birch Society is convinced of a Communist conspiracy pushing America to slavery.

In the operational climate of American politics, the critical difference between the two cultures is that the new culture dominates the heights of national communications, subtly but profoundly influences those who sit astride the daily news flow in New York and Washington, and thus stains, increasingly, the prisms of reporting through which the nation as a whole must see itself.

Much of what White writes here holds true today, except that the new culture, instead of regarding the United States government as an agent of oppression, now looks to it as an aider and abetter in battles against the new perceived oppressors, those who still hold to the old culture. That the new culture should be shocked and dismayed that the old culture would want to protect its perceived rights in this day and age is odd; they cannot expect the old culture to roll over and die simply because of its age. Youth's insistence that what it believes is right merely because it believes it is as shallow as the same insistence they see in the old.

Read in 2009

Atomic Bazaar, the; by William Langewiesche
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
Beggar Queen, the; by Lloyd Alexander
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
Chuck Amuck, by Chuck Jones
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, A; by Mark Twain
Daisy Chain, The; How Borrowed Billions Sank A Texas S&L, by James O'Shea
Dave Barry Turns 50, by Dave Barry (natch)
Disney's World, A Biography, by Leonard Mosley
Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, by Graham Greene
E-Learning by Design, by William Horton
Eragon, by Christopher Paolini
Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
Everything You Need to Know Before You're Hijacked, by Dan McKinnon
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
Flying Dutch, by Tom Holt
From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes, by Robert Clary
God's Smuggler, by Father Andrew, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill
Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade, by Dan Hofstadter
Great Escape, The; by Paul Brickhill
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, The; by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Gulag Archipelago, The; by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Hiroshima, by John Hersey
Imperial Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
Jingo, by Terry Pratchett
John Paul Jones, by Samuel Eliot Morison
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
Maria Looney and the Remarkable Robot, by Jerome Beatty, Jr.
Mirage, by Howard Fast
Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett
Moon-Spinners, The; by Mary Stewart
Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, by Max Hastings
New Freedom, The; by Woodrow Wilson
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting Along in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Nixon: A Life, by Johnathan Aitken
Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, by Graham Allison
Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers, edited by Kelli Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie
Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, edited by Chip Kidd
Peter and the Starcatchers, by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry
Phantom of the Opera, The; by Gaston Leroux
Real Peace, by Richard Nixon
School for Scandal, The; by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis
Sentinel, by Arthur C. Clarke
Telling the Truth, by Lynne Cheney
Thud! by terry Pratchett
Tortilla Flat, by John Steinbeck
Wanderer of the Wasteland, by Zane Grey
We Die Alone, by David Howarth
Wizard's Hall, by Jane Yolen
Wolfling, the; by Sterling North

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Alas . . .

0 comments:

AddThis

Visit The Cokesbury Party Blog!

Twitter Updates

Twitter Updates

Who is Mister Fweem?

Nose Hair Man

Favorite Links

Blog Archive

Whoooo is it?

About Me

Reading. . .

Mister Fweem at Good Reads

The Best Part

Read in 2009

Scott Adams Shillstation

Folderol