I worked until around 1 PM yesterday. This may be what else wore me out. All I accomplished was getting through my email.
It is raining, so maybe it will be cool enough that I can get some work done.
I read American Carnage: Hammett’s Red Harvest and Mass Violence in the United States (CrimeReads) earlier in the week. It is worth reading, not so much for the Hammett novel, but for the history it puts forth. Knowing about things like the race riots mentioned in the essay is one of the reasons Trump and his MAGA franchise have never interested me. That cities were run by corrupt political machines is another reason. My mother was born in 1933; her mother was born in 1898. My mother's relatives were old. It was the Thirties, not the Fifties, that meant anything to them. That was also true for my father's side (born 1934) where his father was born around 1910. The nuclear family, trad wives, were unknown in my family. The women worked. The family was broader than just mom, dad, and kids. Politicians were not saviors without blemish. I am thinking more and more these days that the ideal of "Leave It To Beaver" was propaganda for a movement meant to tamper down the unfinished business of the New Deal; a movement fueled by the survivors of the Great Depression desire to enjoy prosperity, the desire of veterans to enjoy the peace, and by the anti-Communists indulging in their fantasies of why we were better than the Communists. Bubbling under "Leave It To Beaver" are the changes in racial politics that are coming on the heels of Brown v. Board of Education and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Reality was lynchings and Emmett Till confronting the fantasy of TV family life. Reality was the Hollywood blacklist against Truth, Justice, and The American Way. No, we are better now than we were then - so long as you are not a racist male.
I read American Carnage: Hammett’s Red Harvest and Mass Violence in the United States (CrimeReads) earlier in the week. It is worth reading, not so much for the Hammett novel, but for the history it puts forth. Knowing about things like the race riots mentioned in the essay is one of the reasons Trump and his MAGA franchise have never interested me. That cities were run by corrupt political machines is another reason. My mother was born in 1933; her mother was born in 1898. My mother's relatives were old. It was the Thirties, not the Fifties, that meant anything to them. That was also true for my father's side (born 1934) where his father was born around 1910. The nuclear family, trad wives, were unknown in my family. The women worked. The family was broader than just mom, dad, and kids. Politicians were not saviors without blemish. I am thinking more and more these days that the ideal of "Leave It To Beaver" was propaganda for a movement meant to tamper down the unfinished business of the New Deal; a movement fueled by the survivors of the Great Depression desire to enjoy prosperity, the desire of veterans to enjoy the peace, and by the anti-Communists indulging in their fantasies of why we were better than the Communists. Bubbling under "Leave It To Beaver" are the changes in racial politics that are coming on the heels of Brown v. Board of Education and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Reality was lynchings and Emmett Till confronting the fantasy of TV family life. Reality was the Hollywood blacklist against Truth, Justice, and The American Way. No, we are better now than we were then - so long as you are not a racist male.
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