The Scrapbook is not the usual venue for critically examining books of quotations, so we’ll keep our analysis of Lend Me Your Ears: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (Oxford, 480 pages, $24.95) short and to the point: Don’t waste your money. It’s edited by Antony Jay, who’s done some good things in his time (Yes, Prime Minister) and some bad things as well (collaborator with David Frost), but this is not one of the good things.
To begin with, as a British production, it’s heavily weighted with pronouncements from modern Labour politicians and Commonwealth tyrants such as “Tanzanian statesman” Julius Nyerere; even worse, as a British publication, it’s heavy on wisdom from American nonentities—former Vice President Walter Mondale, Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio, Lake Wobegon’s Garrison Keillor, long-forgotten black radical Flo Kennedy—or statements designed to make conservatives look bad. Nearly all the Ronald Reagan quotations, for example, are offhand remarks, while Lenin and Bobby Kennedy get the worshipful treatment. There are no quotations from William F. Buckley.
Most telling of all, the eight Barack Obama entries put the president in the best possible light—“There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America . . . ”—and, curiously, do not include what is probably his best-known statement, describing small-town Pennsylvanians: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
And not to put too fine a point on it, but The Scrapbook is frankly mystified that the editors of a volume that is clearly, and somewhat embarrassingly, friendly to President Obama would run the portrait you see on the dust jacket of a volume entitled Lend Me Your Ears. For the record, The Scrapbook finds -President Obama’s personal appearance entirely satisfactory, including those two ears so lovingly highlighted here. ♦
Your Tax Dollars at Play
It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a grant from the DOJ . . .
Reading the October 4 issue of Current, the trade publication of public broadcasting, The Scrapbook was pleased to learn that not all of that federal stimulus money has been wasted on home-insulation scams:
The children’s media company be-hind Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood received a $460,000 Department of Justice grant this week to train police officers how to deal with children and teens. The Fred Rogers Co.—formerly Family Communications Inc. but still based in Pittsburgh—will hold 28 daylong workshops around the country for some 750 officers, including police trainers. The company has run workshops for 225 in the Pittsburgh area, and will now work with the National League of Cities’ Institute for Youth, Education & Families to “scale up” for the bigger project, part of the National Police Training Program. The workshops’ message will reach additional officers through local training led by attendees and through electronic platforms such as a website, webinars and DVDs, according to Rogers Co. Development Director Alan Friedman. The grant is one of 19 totaling $7.5 million announced by the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). The training workshops, yet to be scheduled, feature Elizabeth and Joseph Seamans’ documentary video of police interaction with children.
The Scrapbook’s reaction? Thank goodness we have a federal Department of Justice to take on the big tasks. The inability of our local police departments to deal with children has been a national scandal for going on two centuries. We’re sure Mister Rogers’s grant recipients will make a difference. We suggest starting with those uniforms. They might be intimidating to children—maybe a zipper cardigan would put the kids more at ease. And those heavy black shoes? Perhaps the police should change into sneakers. And might we also suggest that cops trade their squad cars in for trolleys?
We wish we could say that we were making this up. Alas, it’s just one more sign that Washington has become the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. ♦
Annals of Academe
When we were much younger, The Scrapbook used to enjoy an occasional encounter with the journal of the American Historical Association, called—surprise!—the American Historical Review. Admittedly, many of the articles were a little too specialized for The Scrapbook’s amateur historian tastes. But almost every issue had something of general interest on some major topic or figure.
Well, The Scrapbook hasn’t seen the journal in quite a while—and it turns out we haven’t been missing that much. To get a sense of the journal’s “progress” in recent years—and of what’s up today in the academic discipline of history—take a look at the latest, October 2010 issue of the AHR. Actually, don’t—The Scrapbook has looked so you don’t have to.
Each issue of the Review features an AHR Forum as a much-touted focal point. The October topic? “Intimate Life and Sexuality in Mid-Twentieth-Century France.” How is this somewhat narrow (though not in principle uninteresting) question treated? By a set of case studies that—naturally—refer back to the Forum on “Transnational Sexualities” in the December 2009 issue. As the AHA newsletter explains, “Whereas that forum highlighted transnationalism as an important source of scholarly innovation with respect to the study of sexuality, this forum places the transnational directly in tension with the national.”
How does it do this? Well, one historian discusses “The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944-1946.” The AHA newsletter summarizes as follows: “The management of sexuality was a crucial element not only of postwar transnational conflicts between the U.S. military and the French government, but also of the French government’s struggles to reestablish its control over France in the wake of Germany’s invasion and in the face of American occupation.”
Then you can move right along to “Comrades in the Labor Room: The Lamaze Method of Childbirth Preparation and France’s Cold War Home Front, 1951-1957,” and then to an essay on the “outpouring of confessional correspondence to Simone de Beauvoir” after she published The Second Sex in 1949. It’s all summed up in a comment on the three articles, “Sex, Sovereignty, and Transnational Intimacies,” which “concentrates on the analytical relationship between the transnational and the national in the study of sexualities, as well as on the historical relationship between intimate sexualities and formal politics.”
On the other hand, you can always read a good book written by a historian who, these days (if the book is indeed good), is likelier than not no longer a tenured member of the academy. ♦
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
"It was the end of a twenty-year period of continuous Democratic rule and the beginning of eight years of hard-line Republicanism. The anti-communist scourge—the gavel-pounding red-baiting of Senator Joe McCarthy and his colleagues in HUAC, the subpoenas, ‘loyalty oaths,’ whole-scale firings, imprisonment of the famous ‘Hollywood Ten’ directors and screenwriters who had once been, or still were, members of the Communist Party—had all but gagged free speech in the United . . . " (Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, by Hazel Rowley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). ♦
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