I am such a history wonk!

[jlh]

Last night I watched a documentary on the making of Heaven's Gate, the film that famously bankrupted United Artists in 1980. And tonight I watched a documentary on Mary Pickford, one of the four artists who formed United Artists in 1919.

I can't wait to go back to school, where I get to sit around being wonky about American history all the time!

Comments

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

:D I just made a post sort of (but not really) about liberation theology. I thought about you. :-*

[jlh.livejournal.com]

awww, thanks! I saw that. It's been coming up a lot in the current conversation about possibly having a Latin American Pope.

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

*nods* It's everywhere at the moment, which is why it dovetailed so nicely with the King stuff for use in my comp class on Vietnam. It's always a good thing when those threads will come together like that.

By the way, did you hear our Esteemed Leader pronounce "Kiev" as "Keev" during his meetings with Yushchenko today? Such a proud moment. *headdesk*

[jlh.livejournal.com]

He's such a moron it's beyond depressing.

It's tough, because of course people were on guard against Communism, but advanced capitalism isn't all that great either. They're doing a thing on JPII's history of battling against the Communist authorities in Poland before he became Pope on Nightline tonight. It's odd how this is all over the media, yet in people's massive posts about him they haven't really mentioned it. Clearly I have issues with many things he did, but it's as though he had never done the good he did do. I'm not sure why we have to be so absolutist, or why people have such short memories. I'm beginning to wonder if anyone younger than 30 thinks the Cold War really happened.

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

Watch out, because I'm going to say something here that I'm not sure that I fully believe. I mean, I mostly do, and I've been thinking about this for a while, but I'm afraid that this particular articulation might be overstating the case a little bit.

So, that said....

I think that the "morality=sex" equation is so much a part of the underpinnings of our values system that it's hard to see far beyond it, and so the left is every bit as guilty of oversimplifying these social issues to All About the Body as the right is. And that same bundle of deeply Puritan values has all kinds of neuroses about money and wealth and social class and so as a society we're deeply uncomfortable talking about that as an issue of social justice. The challenge for the progressive left, I think, is to leave that framework behind - to let sociosexual issues (for lack of a better word, and here I mean everything that you think I mean, and maybe more) stop dominating the discourse and reframe things in terms of economics. It's intimidating as all hell and I have no idea if people would run screaming for the hills or not, but it seems to me that it's a macro version of the same "choice" and "rights" framing problems we keep seeing in smaller political communities.

Yeah. OK. I think that says what I mean. Maybe. :D

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

Also, *tinkertinker* I realize that this is hardly a new idea, and I think it's what new progressives have been trying to do for at least ten years. But I don't see much real conversation about it at any kind of grassroots level. I think there will likely have to be a real, *conscious* decision to make this kind of large rhetorical shift, because it would completely reframe some of our deepest values, and I'm not sure that can be done.

This actually relates to something I want to post about sometime soon if I can cool it with the perfume spam - there's a local guy who wants to pass decency statutes about cheerleading routines. It's a whole new, exciting brand of Crazy.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Someone recently wrote a whole article in Esquire or maybe GQ that was skirting all around this. It was a deeply annoying article because it was written in the style of those, 42 true sentences things. 1. You are wrong. 2. But it doesn't matter--you know the type. And mostly what it was saying was that morality and culture and sexual issues were going to do what they would do no matter what anyone wanted, and that the conservatives had to stop fighting it because it was a losing battle, but that the liberals had to stop championing it because most Americans are deeply troubled about it. But if this fellow had stopped being so tricky he would have come upon the real thing, which is that the battle over culture, really just like identity politics and any number of other things, are just the shadowboxing.

The real shit is always about the money, and the liberals lost that battle about 40 years ago, and there isn't a reason for anyone to change that, to go against it. It's incredibly frustrating.

Thing is, I don't think you should have to be a total radical to be able to get capitalism under some kind of control. So I'm not entirely sure what way to go. Though I do think that John Edwards had some really interesting and actually fairly radical things to say about this.

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

The real shit is always about the money, and the liberals lost that battle about 40 years ago, and there isn't a reason for anyone to change that, to go against it. It's incredibly frustrating.


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Dammit, Clio. You are so defeatist. *pouts*

Probably largely because I live in Houston, I have this long habit of seeing questions of economy as questions of cheap and reliable energy. Goldman Sachs last week predicted a superspike in oil prices (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050331/bs_afp/commoditiesenergyoil_050331222501) to a possible $100+ per barrel. The city has no idea what to do with itself; we can't decide if this would be a boon for us (because the last time oil prices were high, the city made a mint and had enough money to aircondition EVERYTHING OMG!!!) or the beginning of the end of our supersprawl model of urban development. It's all very crazy in the energy sector just at the moment, and we are feeling it.

But my point (yes, I had one) is that I have this habit of seeing this as the breaking point and the fulcrum of the new economy. Because at some point, poor people are going to have to decide that they don't really care if gay people can get married or Janet Jackson can flash her boob at the Super Bowl or what-the-hell-ever has them voting contrary to their own best interests. These things don't matter all that much when you can't get to work because we've started rationing gasoline so we don't have to pay those crazy Yur-o-peen prices, and you can't get from the farflung country location you have to live in to afford property into the center of town where your job is.

God, I'm ramblyranty tonight. Anyway, I think that it's not quite so desperate as having lost the fight on capital distribution, I really don't. And I think that there is a chance to turn conversation to wealth, where it belongs, but I think that there will have to be crisis first to get people just hungry enough to see clearly, and we'll have to assume/hope that we don't get all distracted by issues that are important but not necessarily central, which is really tricky, because everybody thinks their own issues are central.

Ah, yeah. We're so screwed. *cries*