Left in the West - history

First they came for our health care...

Jay Stevens — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:30:37 GMT

It's quotation day!

From "The American Future," by Simon Schama:

In the report "written at a gallop" and delivered in fifty-five days, [Montgomery C] Meigs declared it a scandal that "the nation's most honored citizens" had to suffer through the heat and dust of a Washington summer, slaking their thirst only with dangerously corrupted water. The rememdy would doubtless be ambitious and therefore expensive, but Congress should think loftily when it came to the good of the commonweal for "water should be as free as air and always supplied by government."

Montgomery Meigs was the Quartermaster General during the Civil War. This excerpt deals with Meigs' proposal to build an aqueduct for Washington DC. The plan was adopted and Meigs supervised the project, which began in 1853. The aqueduct is still standing today.

Discuss. And feel free to make your own comparisons to health care, disparagement of the recent and - as Meigs would no doubt see it - destructive tendency to privatize public functions. And make no doubt of it - they want our water, too!

Time for some "sacred groves"

Jay Stevens — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:31:35 GMT

Turns out the Mayan civilization practiced a form of forest conservation - until they abandoned the years-old practice in a building frenzy...which may have led to their downfall:

So what led to the downfall of the Maya? Whether it was the gods' displeasure or not, the answer came from the heavens.
"When you clear all the forests, it changes the hydrologic cycle," says Lentz. "The world is like a flat surface with all the trees acting as sponges on it. The trees absorb the water. Without the trees, there is no buffer to stop the water from runoff. That causes soil erosion, which then chokes the rivers and streams. With no trees, you lose water retention in the soil or aquifers so the ground dries up and then there is less transpiration, so therefore less rainfall as well."
In addition to using the trees as timber, the Maya also burned the trees, adding carbon to the air in the form of carbon dioxide. Trees remove carbon dioxide from the air and return oxygen in its place, thus cleaning and purifying the air.
"Forests provide many benefits to society," says Lentz. "The Maya forests provided timber, fuel, food, fiber and medicine in addition to the ecosystem services of cleansing the air and water. Just as forests provided essential resources for the ancient Maya, the same is true for our civilization today."

(H/T Metafilter.)

Hilarious: Rightwing Tries to Claim Mantle of Thomas Paine

Matt Singer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:39:31 GMT

If you've missed it, Glenn Beck is claiming the mantle of Thomas Paine. Paine, of course, was the revolutionary deemed too radical to help write the Constitution. He advocated for, among other things, free public education, a guaranteed minimum income, and massive wealth redistribution. He was also pretty ardently against mainstream religion.

So, um, yeah, new rightwing hero.

Memo to Glenn Beck: read a book. Might I suggest Mike Lux's The Progressive Revolution? (Lux, by the way, will be visiting Montana in late May to talk about this book, including, I hope, why the idea of a conservative Tom Paine is so hilarious.)

Update -- More hilarious, MT Pundit muses on how the media will completely ignore these events in the same post where he embeds a video from FoxNews essentially giving free promotion for the whole AstroTurf operation.

The modern conservative movement is a group of people who won a million dollars in the lottery and spend all their time complaining about taxes.

Montana History Saturday

Anna — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:09:46 GMT

Some background: I'm in Montana working on master's degree in history. I focus on modern American history, and I'm primarily interested in immigration, ethnicity, and gender. I just completed my first year of coursework in May, so I'm shifting gears to start researching my thesis, which will be about World War II-era war brides, women who married American servicemen and immigrated to the United States (and specifically Montana) in the months and years directly following World War II.

At any rate, while researching this week, I found a very sweet photo of a newly arrived English war bride and her husband on the front page of the April 5, 1946 edition of the Great Falls Tribune.

(The picture is sort of big, so I'll continue below...)

They look so happy. I think one has to be kind of a romantic at heart to really be taken in by these stories.

Incidentally, Ruth Poore Batchen, the woman in the photo, took part in the Montana War Brides Oral History Project (the existence of which is the reason I'm doing part of my graduate work here). She and Wendell, her husband, moved to Billings from Cut Bank in 1949. They raised six children. Wendell died in 1976. Ruth remarried after Wendell's death and lived in Billings until she passed away in February, 2004.

Neiwert on "Liberal Fascism"

Jay Stevens — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 05:10:45 GMT

Ross Douthat:

Here is some free advice for liberals who don't care much for Jonah Goldberg or his (bestselling) new volume: Either confine yourself to dismissive snark, of the sort perfected by my colleague Matt, or buckle down and actually read the damn thing.

Of course, the premise is patently ludicrous, and shouldn't have earned a publisher, let alone an audience, but, hey, fair enough.

David Neiwert:

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century....[C]ompletely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation's most horrific historical events....Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.
This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

(Neiwert on Goldberg's methodology.)

Goldberg's thesis is political, not historical or academic. It's the same kind of creepy, selective revisionism found in David Irving's Holocaust denial books and from the folks that come up with arguments that say -- I dunno -- liberal progressivism is really a form of Hobbesian government, or that Social Darwinism was an early manifestation of the welfare state.

Still, the media will call Goldberg "controversial," and give him the airtime to spout his ridiculous theories.

Reminds me of this clip from the Jon Stewart show (oh, how we rue the writer's strike!):

CORDDRY: I'm sorry, my opinion? No, I don't have 'o-pin-i-ons'. I'm a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called 'objectivity' - might wanna look it up some day.
STEWART: Doesn't objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out what's credible and what isn't?
CORDDRY: Whoa-ho! Well, well, well - sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! [high-pitched, effeminate] 'Ooh, this allegation is spurious! Upon investigation this claim lacks any basis in reality! Mmm, mmm, mmm.' Listen buddy: not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me.

Then again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the media examines Goldberg's claims. That way we all learn something about fascism, Goldberg, and the conservative push to inject revisionist fallacies into the public discourse, accusing their political opponents of the things very much alive in their own movement. A fella can dream, can't he?