Camelot in one sentence

My former colleague Whet Moser has the best one-sentence summary of the mysteriously deified Kennedy administration:

apparently the sex-addicted son of a Neville Chamberlain sympathizer gave America the sense of national possibility it needed to get into the Vietnam War, leave a bunch of Cuban exiles for dead as part of the worst coup attempt ever, run to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, and help install the Baath party as the ruling party of Iraq.

I'm up for some more of the same, applied to outrageously overrated graven images like Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. If nothing else, telling truth in one sentence might just take the snooze out of history class.

Reform for me but not for thee

Catalyst Chicago doesn't always pick fights with city school reformers, so it's especially interesting when they do. This story by John Myers appeared in December:

Chicago Public Schools is closing in on its goal of opening 100 new schools under Renaissance 2010, but almost half of the communities identified as most in need of high-performing schools have yet to get them.

No surprises here. Some of the same communities, mostly South Side and mostly black, that were shortchanged by the old educational order are being shortchanged by the new one: East Garfield Park, Near South Side, Riverdale, Roseland, South Chicago, South Shore, Washington Park, West Elsdon, West Lawn, and West Pullman.

Vietnam's revenge

A tidbit from Stephen Kotkin's article on Vietnam in the January 30 New Republic
(requires $ubscription although you can get a taste here):

At 17.5 percent, Vietnam has a significantly higher degree of per capita Internet penetration than China (10 percent) or Indonesia (8 percent)....

Vietnam ranks sixth globally in recorded hits on MIT's "open courseware" site, which offers information from more than fifteen hundred college courses -- exclusively in English. If nothing else, this testifies to aspirations.

Actually, the site (which is not the same as an MIT education but no doubt a sight better than none at all) does offer at least some courses translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and both simplified and traditional Chinese. Among the most frequently visited are courses in classical mechanics, linear algebra, electricity and magnetism, and circuits and electronics.

What voting is like these days

A good blog post can bring all the abstract junk of journalism down to earth. Case in point, Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors on voting in the South Carolina primary.

Rick Perlstein

My profile of the author of Before the Storm and the forthcoming Nixonland is in this week's Chicago Reader. If you'd rather read excerpts, Digby has some.

Marketing the South

If you've ever wondered how a flag that sympolizes slavery, racism, terror, and treason came to be a piece of Americana treasured by those who think themselves conservative patriots, you may be interested in this press release summarizing an article on the marketing of the South from the February Journal of Consumer Research. Authors Craig Thompson and Kelly Tian report on a

broad coalition of Southern mythmakers [who] sought to defend the honor of their Confederate ancestors, rebuke the cultural stigmas that had been ascribed to white Southern identities and perhaps most of all, attract infusions of Northern capital needed to build a more prosperous New South.

The key white identity myths are the Lost Cause (Confederate soldiers as "gallant Christian Knights"), Moonlight and Magnolias (white Southern womanhood as "a vulnerable vessel of virtue"), and Celtic Rednecks (poor whites as hillbillies).

And, I gather, the less said about those human beings owned by the first two categories of people, the better.

A bit of business

If you don't find me here some days, or if you discover a sudden need to keep up with Midwestern genealogy, you can mosey over to
http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com/