How Lewis Lapham knew the CIA wasn't for him

Some readers saw a contradiction in Mr. Lapham's affluent life and his stalwart liberalism. But he said he made his choice soon after graduating from Yale, when he applied for a job with the C.I.A., then a bastion of Ivy League elitism.

The first question he was asked, he said, was "When standing on the 13th tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club does one take from the bag?"

"They wanted to make sure you were the right sort," he explained.

He found the question off-putting and dropped his spy ambitions for a career in journalism, although he said he knew the answer: a 7- iron.

- Robert McFadden, 'Lewis H Lapham, Harper’s Editor and Piercing Columnist, Dies at 89', New York Times, 24 July 2024

The golden age of American long-distance high-speed diesel trains

[In 1935] the Union Pacific train was immediately put into service as The City of Portland between Chicago and Portland, Oregon, and the Milwaukee Road soon launched the Twin Cities Hiawatha, running between the same two cities as the Burlington's Twin Cities Zephyr but powered by new steam locomotives designed to run at 100 mph. Diesel, though, was now the fashion and within a couple of years there were more than a dozen of these new diesel services, trying to outdo each other with the extra facilities and comfort they provided. Pullman joined in the craze by providing streamlined lightweight cars for several of these trains, but it was the decision of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad to create an all-Pullman service that resulted in the service which could, justifiably, lay claim to being the most luxurious train in the world, pace the Orient Express. This was the Super Chief, which started running between Chicago and Los Angeles in 1936 in just under forty hours, a timetable that saved a full half-day on its steam predecessor, the Santa Fe's old Chief, a prestigious steam train introduced a decade before. The Super Chief became the train of choice for movie stars and studio moguls for their trips between the coasts and undoubtedly set a new standard of comfort for its passengers: 'Designed within by a group of eminent architects and stylists, its restaurant, observation lounge, bar and wide choice of overnight accommodation - every room richly panelled in wood veneers from the four quarters of the world were very reasonable replicas of the hotel accommodation to which the Hollywood haut monde who frequented it were accustomed.

These new streamliner services invariably offered all the accoutrements of the trains of the previous generation, but with modern extras such as air conditioning and electric razor points. The more spacious offered lounges, cocktail bars and office facilities, and all provided meals that today would earn them a Michelin star or two, elegantly hosted by a dinner-jacketed maître d', as well as offering various sleeping car options. There was, too, a great emphasis on making the trip itself into a pleasure, rather than merely a trial to be endured, with a great emphasis on the smoke-free views afforded by the much larger windows.

The result of this feverish activity was that, for a short period in the late 1930s, the ten fastest regular train services in the world were all American streamliners. It was not so much the speed or the diesel- powered engines that caught the public's imagination, but rather their streamlining. They were, quite literally, beautiful behemoths, a source of pride and modernity in an era of economic struggle and austerity. The size and power of the elegant diesels seemed to epitomize American values, and gave people something to celebrate.

- Christian Wolmar, The Great Railway Revolution: The Epic Story of the American Railroad, London, 2012, p.330-1.

See also:
Blog: The Sunday morning train to Verona, 15 June 2015

Blog: The break of gauge, 14 January 2014 
Blog: Take the 'A' train, 10 October 2009
Blog: You can get to Taumarunui going north or south, 24 May 2009

Trump's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic

Trump had no idea how to handle [the Covid-19 pandemic]. The virus did not respond to his favorite instruments of power. It could not be cowed by Twitter posts, overpowered by campaign rally chants, or silenced by playground insults. For so long, Trump had believed he could overcome nearly any obstacle through sheer force of will, and in many cases he had been astonishingly successful. Over the course of his seven decades, Trump had managed to bluster and bully his way past bankruptcies, failed business ventures, lenders demanding repayment, fraud and discrimination lawsuits, and, once he reached the White House, a special counsel and even congressional impeachment. But he could not will away a plague. So he tried denial, another favorite Trump tactic. That did not work either.

The emerging pandemic would expose all the weaknesses of his divisive presidency - his distrust of his own staff and the rest of the government, his intense focus on loyalty and purges, his penchant for encouraging conflict between factions within his own circle, his personal isolation, his obsessive war with the media, his refusal, or inability, to take in new information, and his indecisiveness when forced to make tough decisions.

Trump had always been indifferent to most substantive policy matters and skeptical of anything that experts, scientific or otherwise, told him. He turned everything into a political question whose answer was whatever would benefit him politically. And that is how he would approach this crisis too. "From the time this thing hit," said an adviser who spoke frequently with the president, "his only calculus was how does it affect my re-election."

- Peter Baker & Susan Glasser, The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, New York, 2022, p.37

The Irish Setter as proponent for addictive substances

"No matter which form of tenseness you feel, try this experiment: ease up and enjoy a Camel"

(The propensity for Irish Setters to smoke fags had hitherto been unidentified)

- New York Times, 26 September 1938

An inmate at Rikers Island

There were no suicides in my cellblock during my time at Rikers, but an inmate in one of the adjoining blocks had hanged himself in the shower room soon after I arrived. I remember being disgusted when I heard one of the COs [correctional officers] referring to the victim as 'another mope on a rope'. But that was early on in my sentence, before my ongoing Rikers 'education' taught me to take the callousness of the average guard for granted. The few guards who treated the inmates decently turned out to be the crooked ones who smuggled drugs into the cellblocks. Their profit motive gave them reason to consider us as potential customers, rather than just bags of meat that had to be inventoried three times a day, so in the upside-down world of prison life these black-market capitalists were actually the only guards to exhibit any human compassion. I considered it a lucky break to have been assigned to a cell block where one of these bent guards held the keys.

With our in-house smuggler on duty, the overnight hours in the dorm were a lot more mellow than they would have been if the hard-ass CO who worked the day shift had been in charge. At least at night we didn't have to worry that the smell of marijuana smoke would be reported to the shift commander and bring the flying squad rushing in to search our bunks and lockers for contraband. This was a real bonus. Our cell block was crammed with eighty inmates in a space built to house fifty, so the air in the dorm was always foul - even when the barred windows set high in the cell walls were cracked for ventilation. But the scent of burning marijuana after lights-out brought a welcome change that I came to appreciate as one of those minor blessings that made prison life slightly more tolerable. That's one lesson you can count on a place like Rikers to teach you - how to savour the little things. It was also the one lesson I promised myself I'd keep in mind once I hit the streets again.

- Peter Kaldheim, Idiot Wind: a Memoir, Edinburgh, 2019, p.282-3.

Dueling billionaires are no substitute for democracy

The increasing dominance of money from the super-wealthy would be less of a problem if their attitudes were the same as those of most other Americans. The power of Democratic billionaires presumably would balance the power of Republican billionaires. But in reality the rich have quite different priorities from average Americans. Dueling billionaires are no substitute for democracy. According to a Pew Research poll, a large majority of Americans, regardless of party, are worried about jobs and wages. Yet when political scientists Benjamin Page and Larry Bartels surveyed Chicagoans with an average net worth of $14 million, their biggest concerns were the budget deficit and excessive government spending. And no surprise these wealthy individuals were also far less willing than were other Americans to raise taxes on the rich and more willing to cut Social Security and Medicare. They also opposed things most other Americans favored, such as increasing spending on schools and raising the minimum wage.

These wealthy respondents also differed from the rest of America in their political influence. In the previous twelve months, two-thirds had contributed (an average of $4,633) to political campaigns. A fifth had "bundled" contributions with others. That bought them the kind of political access most Americans only dream of. About half had recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative, and nearly half those contacts concerned matters of narrow economic self-interest rather than broader national concern. Mind you, this is just the wealthy of one city, Chicago. Multiply it across the entire United States and you see who our elected representatives are listening to and why. The survey didn't even include the wealth and political clout of Wall Street and big corporations. Multiply the multiplier.

- Robert Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, London, 2020, p.65-66.

The American porch visit shines with civility

Porch society is described by Gaylord Gibbon in his Etiquette Along the Mississippi (p. 28), a book not found in our house but it applied to us anyway:

The backyard is for privacy. Only people walking in the alley will bother you, and they're the sort who would anyway. The porch is sociable, but certain rules apply:

• Even if you're screened from public view, it's polite to call out hello to passers-by you know. It's up to them to stop or not. It's up to you to invite them in or not. The porch is a room of your house, not part of the yard. Only peddlers or certain ministers would barge right in. 
• If you say, "Why don't you come up and sit for a bit?," it is customary for them to decline politely. If the invite was legit, it should then be repeated. 
• An invite to the porch is not an invite to the house. Its terms are limited to a brief visit on the porch, no refreshments necessarily provided unless the occupants have such at hand.
• When the host stands up and stretches or says, "Well --," the visitor should need no further signal that the visit has ended. Only an oaf would remain longer. If the host says, "You don't have to run, do you?," this is not a question but a pleasantry.

Humankind knows no finer amenity than the screened porch. It is the temple of family life, and the sacred preserve of the luxurious custom known as "visiting." Compare it to the barbarity of the "business lunch," the hideous conversational burden of the cocktail party, and the prison that is the formal dinner, the porch visit shines with civility.

- Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, New York, 1985, p.131-2.

See also:

Blog: The importance of movies to Gopher Prairie, 6 October 2022    

Blog: The presidential art of handshaking, 18 August 2018 

Blog: A legal genius at work, 11 March 2013

A calculated, multipart effort to overturn the vote

After interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses and obtaining millions of pages of documents, the Jan. 6 committee has presented a sweeping summation of its case placing Mr. Trump at the center of a calculated, multipart effort to overturn the vote that began even before Election Day.

Despite losing the election, Mr. Trump ignored the facts and aggressively sought to subvert the results, pressuring state officials, strong-arming Justice Department leaders and seeking to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won, according to evidence presented by the committee. Then, with his hold on power slipping, Mr. Trump called a crowd of his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, mobilizing far-right extremists, and told them to march on the Capitol. As hundreds of people stormed the building, assaulting police officers and disrupting the certification of the election, Mr. Trump did nothing for hours to stop the violence, the committee has shown.

Mr. Trump and his allies are the focus of several criminal investigations, including into the events that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Justice Department is conducting its own sprawling inquiry into the roles Mr. Trump and some of his allies played in seeking to subvert the 2020 election. In addition, Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta-area district attorney, has been leading a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.

- 'Jan. 6 Panel Issues Subpoena to Trump, Setting Up Legal Battle Over Testimony', New York Times, 21 October 2022

Words come more easily to him than juiceless sentences

From a 1954 BBC radio broadcast commissioned while actor Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) was working in America, on the anti-communist witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57), which were wracking Hollywood:  

'To the outside observer there is nothing particularly striking about the Senator - there is no fire, no perceptible fanaticism, and curiously no oratorical powers. Words come more easily to him than juiceless sentences, which is normal; but even words fall grudgingly from his lips - his eyes, meanwhile, having all the dispassionate intensity of a lion who is having his own private troubles gnawing a knuckle. His voice is plaintive by nature, and trembles obediently when a particularly emotional tone is ordered by the brain. On other occasions, it tries the elusive intonations of sarcasm, sounding much like a car with a dying battery, and even attempts the major key of jocularity when bonhomie is called for, but it is a sad laugh, and one which does not invite participation.

It is as though he had cheated the physical restrictions placed on him by nature, and had trained the very shortcomings of his equipment into weapons. His own evident lack of wit makes him impervious to the wit of others; his own inability to listen makes him immune to argument; his own tortuous train of thought wears down the opposition; his crawling reflexes, his unnaturally slow and often muddled delivery force quicker minds to function at a disadvantage below their normal speeds. And yet, cumbersome as is the Senator in action, his changes of direction, like those of the charging rhinoceros, are often executed with alarming ease. A mind trained in all the arts of tactical expediency urges the ponderous machinery on its provocative way.

Whenever he is compelled to admit that he doesn't know, he does so with an inflection suggesting that it isn't worth knowing. When ever he says he does know, he does so with an inflection suggesting that others don't - and won't. This then is the outward face of the man who has heard voices telling him to go and root out Communists and this is the face of a man who recognizes his potential enemy in everyone he meets. Like a water-diviner, he treads the desert with a home-made rod, and shouts his triumph with every flicker of the instrument, leaving hard-working professional men to scratch the soil for evidence.

No one who has enjoyed an argument, no one who has entertained challenging doubt, no one who relishes an unfettered view of history and of the current scene, could possibly be a communist. But anti-communism is no creed - democracy is no creed - it is a vehicle for the enjoyment of freedom, for the ventilation of thought, for the exercise of mutual respect, even in opposition. This is the heritage which has given debate its laws. This is the heritage which is traditionally so near the heart of this immense republic, and for which so many of her sons have died.

When anti-communism attempts to become a creed, it fights with the arms of its enemy, and like its enemy, it breeds injustice, fear, corruption. It casts away the true platform of democracy, and destroys the sense of moral superiority without which no ethical struggle is ever won.

This majestic land, these United States, know by instinct in fact they have often taught us from more venerable parts that democracy can never be a prison - it is a room with the windows open'.

- Peter Ustinov, Dear Me, Harmondsworth, Middx., 1977, p.248-9

The Dream Factory of old Hollywood

David Niven gives his impressions of the bustling movie factories of Hollywood at the time of his arrival in California as a would-be actor in 1934:

'Eddie Lowe taught me much about Hollywood in the weeks to come. He tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to arouse the interest of his producer friends in my stagnant career and personally gave me a conducted tour of one Dream Factory in which he worked. He drove me around the cosily-named Back Lot, a two-hundred-acre spread, upon which stood the permanent sets, including New York streets (some smart, some brown stone), New England, French, and Spanish villages, medieval castles, a railroad station complete with rolling stock. Lakes with wave-making machines and rustic bridges, a university campus, an airliner, a section of jungle and another of pine forest, a Mississippi steamboat, a three-masted schooner, native canoes, submarine, a stretch of desert with ruined fort and in case anything was missing, several acres of carefully dismantled, dock and stored, streets, villages, cathedrals, mud huts, dance hall skating rinks, ball parks, theatres, vineyards, slums, south plantations, and oriental palaces. Lowe also took me to the Studio's Western ranch; several hundred acres of rolling hill the San Fernando Valley upon which stood the permanent townships and Indian habitations. 

Huge tracts of make believe were necessary to Hollywood because air travel was in its infancy and if, for instance, a film was set in Venice, canals, churches, palazzi, gondolas and bridges would soon be conjured up locally. Small wonder then, that Gone With The Wind was filmed in Culver City, Mutiny on the Bounty just off Catalina Island, The Charge of the Light Brigade in the San Fernando Valley, The Hunchback of Notre Dame adjacent to Vine Street, The Ten Commandments behind the Western Costume Company, The Adventures of Marco Polo a hundred yards from the city gasometer, and Scrooge's breath in A Christmas Carol imaginatively photographed in a vast refrigerator near the Ambassador Hotel. 

Under Eddie Lowe's sponsorship I spent days wandering about the Back Lot, and also the main studio at the heart of the Dream Factory where for some reason the buildings, car park and streets were uniformly white or pale yellow thus extracting the maximum amount of glare from the cloudless California sky, and where the whole place resembled a mixture of the business district of a thriving small town and the maintenance area of a busy airport. Twenty or thirty towering, hangar-like, sound stages clustered together, dominated the centre, surrounded by the Fire Department, the generator turbines, the electrical grid, the transportation, construction, carpenter and plasterer departments, camera and electrical stores, wardrobe departments, legal departments, acres of dismantled 'sets' and furniture repositories, 'tailoring' and 'dressmaking' shops and ever widening circles of photographic studios, painters' stores, cutting rooms, make-up, hairdressing and sound departments, projection rooms and theatres, rehearsal halls, orchestra recording theatres, accommodation for set designers and set dressers, the story department, accounting offices, publicity offices, casting offices, fan-mail departments, greenhouses, restaurants, a hospital, a gymnasium and a shoe-shine parlour'

- David Niven, Bring on the Empty Horses, London, 1975, p.5-7 (paragraph breaks inserted for convenience)

The waning days of Republican privilege

America’s political institutions are currently biased – in many cases quite aggressively – in favor of conservatives. Restrictive voting laws make casting a ballot disproportionately difficult for lower-income, non-white and young Americans. Unprecedented gerrymandering gives Republicans a built-in advantage in the race for the House, and according to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the Senate’s bias toward rural states makes the chamber about seven points redder than the nation as a whole. Thanks to the electoral college, two of the past five presidential elections have been won by Republicans who lost the popular vote – one reason why even before Justice Ginsburg’s death, 15 of the past 19 supreme court justices were appointed by GOP presidents.

The conservative movement, in other words, already had it pretty good. The average American disagrees with Republican orthodoxy on every major issue: healthcare, climate change, gun violence, immigration, taxes, Covid response. Yet thanks to the biases embedded in the American political process, Republicans have not just remained viable, but secured extraordinary amounts of power. We can’t know for certain who would benefit from upending the status quo that existed at the time of Justice Ginsburg’s passing – but we do know which party has the most to lose.

- David Litt, 'Republicans will replace RBG but Democrats hold the trump cards – no, really', Guardian, 23 September 2020

The presidential art of handshaking

On rare occasions [President James K.] Polk essayed the light touch. Once, for instance, he explained to some people how he handled the problem of handshaking. 'I told them,' he confided to his diary, 'that I had found that there was great art in shaking hands, and that I could shake hands during the whole day without suffering any bad effects from it. They were curious to know what this art was. I told them that if a man surrendered his arm to be shaken, by some horizontally, by others perpendicularly, and by others again with a strong grip, he could not fail to suffer severely from it, but that if he would shake and not be shaken, grip and not be gripped, taking care always to squeeze the hand of his adversary as hard as he squeezed him, that he suffered no inconvenience from it. I told them also that I could generally anticipate when I was to have a strong grip, and that when I observed a strong man approaching I generally took advantage of him by being a little quicker than he was and seizing him by the tip of his fingers, giving him a hearty shake, and thus preventing him from getting a full grip upon me'. Polk's auditors were much amused by his exposition, but Polk ended up being deadly serious about it. There was 'much philosophy,' he decided, in what he had said: 'though I gave my account of the operation playfully, it is all true'.

- James K. Polk (US President 1845-49), quoted in P.F. Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, 1981, p.101.

See also:
Music: They Might Be Giants - James K Polk
Blog: Would Limbaugh be a better president than SpongeBob?, 25 February 2016
TV: American Idol - Reagan, 26 March 2011

The 'suicide club' of the early US Air Mail Service

In August 1918, the [US] post took over airmail operations from the military, and the department's own civilian pilots began to fly its own biplanes, which were either custom-built or remodeled for postal service. (De Havilland's DH-4, which had a more powerful 400-horsepower engine, superseded the Jenny as the fleet's workhorse). Much like the Pony [Express] riders, the aviators were expected to satisfy their employers' obsessions with speed and sticking to the schedule regardless of conditions. They raced their finicky, flimsy, unreliable aircraft through dense fogs, blizzards, and towering mountain ranges, protected mostly by the small planes' responsiveness and slow speeds. Of the 200 pilots who belonged to the service's "suicide club" between 1918 and 1926, 35 died on duty, but many more emerged bloody and battered from crashes.

Somehow, the Air Mail Service managed to complete 90 percent of its flights, although emergency landings were common. Pilot Dean Smith telegraphed a cryptic explanation to headquarters after his engine quit in midair, causing an unusual disaster: "Only place to land on cow. Killed cow. Wrecked plane. Scared me. Smith." While carrying the mail from Elko, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho, Paul Scott was forced to land by a broken oil line; then, followed by a pack of wolves, he walked 27 miles for help. When Henry Boonstra's carburetor froze during a snowstorm, he set the plane down on a 9400-foot-high Utah mountain, grabbed the mail, and stumbled through heavy drifts for 33 hours before reaching a ranch house. The resident shepherd lent him a horse, and the pilot finally reached the nearest village and phone three days later. The aviators accepted such hair-raising risks less for the salary than from the desire to hold one of the few jobs in the world that allowed them to fly. As Smith put it, "Alone in an empty cockpit, there is nothing and everything to see. It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic and humdrum".

Thrill-seeking behaviour has a strong genetic component, and the right stuff clearly ran in the family of Katherine Stinson, the first woman authorised to fly the US mail. Her parents operated a flight school in Texas, her sister Marjorie trained combat pilots in World War I, and her brother Eddie founded the Stinson Aircraft Company. The "Flying Schoolgirl" took America by storm with her loop-the-loops and skywriting, to say nothing of her leather garb and trousers, then still a rarity for women. In 1913, she amazed the crowd at the Montana State Fair by dropping mailbags from her sketchy wood-and-fabric plane, then went on to enthrall fans abroad before volunteering to be a combat pilot in 1917. She was rejected because of her sex but helped the cause by flying for pledges that brought $2 million to the Red Cross. In 1918, Stinson signed on as a regular Air Mail Service pilot and, despite a crash landing en route from Chicago to New York, managed to break a record for covering 783 miles in 11 hours. (Around 1920, tuberculosis forced her back to earth; she moved to New Mexico for her health, became a successful architect, and lived to the age of 86).

- Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, New York, 2016, p224-5.

See also:
Blog: From London to Amsterdam, 1922, 20 February 2017
Blog: Seattle Museum of Flight, 25 April 2013
Blog: Le Bourget Air & Space Museum, 18 March 2011

The death of American compromise

[Former US Speaker of the House of Representatives John] Boehner worries about the deepening fissures in American society. But he sees Trump as more of a symptom than the cause of what is a longer arc of social and ideological alienation, fueled by talk radio and Fox News on the right and MSNBC and social media on the left. “People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion.” Why is that? “Because it wasn’t him!” Boehner replies. “It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide.” [...]

Boehner believes Americans are ill-informed because of their retreat into media echo chambers, one of two incurable causes of the country’s polarization. Another is inextricably related: the unwillingness of lawmakers to collaborate across the aisle, for fear of recriminations from the base. Boehner says the fact he and Obama golfed together only once—and agreed that it was usually better for him to sneak into the White House—speaks to how the two parties punish compromise. He doesn’t foresee this toxic political climate improving, ticking off potential fixes—term limits, redistricting reform—that he says won’t make a bit of difference. “It’s going to take an intervening event for Americans to realize that first, we are Americans,” he says. An intervening event? “Something cataclysmic,” he responds, gazing upward.

- Tim Alberta, 'John Boehner Unchained', Politico, Nov/Dec 2017

Boston's habituation to illicit trade

[T]he repeal of the Stamp Act and the loss of income to the Exchequer only intensified the problem of funding the colonies, containing the French and supporting both a military infrastructure and legal system (of customs officials, judges and governors) needed to underpin parliamentary sovereignty. The young Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, supported by Prime Minister Grenville, came up with an alternative solution in the form of the 1767 Revenue Act. The so-called 'Townshend duties' imposed an import tax (rather than the Stamp Act's direct tax on indigenous produce) on all glass, paper, lead, paint and tea shipped into the American colonies. And these new taxes came with a Board of Customs Commissioners designed to end Boston's dockside grey economy and finally put the imperial finances on a stable footing. Needless to say, the duties were met with an indignant response. Because for all of Samuel Adams' protestations of constitutional propriety and lawfulness, the Boston economy was in fact heavily dependent upon illegal smuggling and the avoidance of duties. 'We have been so long habituated to illicit trade that people in general see no evil in it,' Thomas Hutchinson censoriously commented. He estimated that some three-quarters of the consumer goods brought into America were done so illegally. And the high-yielding crates of Chinese tea were amongst the most regularly smuggled goods.

In Boston, the imposition of new taxes on established imports instantly politicised the waterfront, and, with it, Boston's relationship with the mother country. Within a matter of weeks, the customs officials, the Royal Navy and the tax collectors who patrolled the wharves and jetties metamorphosed from an irksome but necessary bureaucracy to the aggressive arm of a foreign government. The British Empire imperceptibly shifted from an enterprise of which Boston was a part to something approaching an oppressive, occupying force.

- Tristram Hunt, Ten Cities That Made an Empire, London, 2014, p.55-56.  

See also:
History: The peculation of Benjamin Franklin, 8 February 2016
History: Benjamin Franklin's plan to colonise New Zealand,  7 December 2015
History: When John Peel met JFK, 8 May 2017

When John Peel met JFK

The following day [in 1961], the Kennedy/Johnson parade followed the same route [in Dallas], with the same cadets and the same majorettes. There seemed to be more people on the pavements and it seemed they were in a sombre mood. Although Lyndon Johnson was obviously one of them, Kennedy definitely was not. He was a Yankee, a Catholic and, it was universally agreed, a smartarse, and folks had, to a degree, turned out to hate him. At one stage, low on the hill that ran up Main Street from the area where Kennedy was, a couple of years later, to die, the motorcade came to a standstill opposite me. Seizing the moment, I ran forward to shake JFK's hand. 'Good luck, Mr Kennedy,' I said. 'Hey, you're from England,' he replied. When I told him that this was so, he asked me where from exactly, why I was in Texas, whether I liked it and whether I planned to stay. I was amazed, as we talked, that a man running for President of the USA could be interested in what I had to tell him. Hell, I couldn't even vote for him. Then he noticed the camera in my hand. 'Are you going to take a photo?' the future President asked, and when I said I'd like to, he suggested I should go back a few steps then, when I was ready, shout and he'd grin at me. So I stepped back three or four feet, raised the camera and yelled, 'Hey, Mr Kennedy.' He smiled and I pressed the button before going back to the side of the still stationary car to thank him. 'What are you going to do if that doesn't come out?' he asked. 'Why don't you take another one over the windscreen of the car? Then you can get Mr Johnson in as well.' So I moved to the front of the car, leaned on the bonnet and took another photograph. When I ran back to speak to John Kennedy again, someone else was talking to him, but he still found time to nod and suggest that I went to the other side of the car to meet LBJ. This I did before hurrying back to work. 

This is a story I've told, I'm afraid, hundreds of times, and each time have watched as my audiences have grown more incredulous. I have often imagined them wanting to ask whether there were Martians present at the events I described or whether I heard choirs of angels singing 'Hosanna!' as we spoke, and have wished that I finish by saying, reaching into my back pocket as I do, 'and here are the photographs'

- John Peel, Margrave of the Marshes, London, 2005, p.148-9.

[As luck would have it, the Peel JFK photos did in fact survive the destructive urges of Peel's first wife, and appear in Peel's autobiography.]

Sounds familiar

'[L]eaders who are highly successful in chaotic contexts can develop an overinflated self-image, becoming legends in their own minds. When they generate cultlike adoration, leading actually becomes harder for them because a circle of admiring supporters cuts them off from accurate information'.

- D.J.Snowden & M.E.Bourne, 'A leader's framework for decision making', Harvard Business Review, November 2007.

A much less dangerous imagination

[A]fter the 80s, the new American right saw things differently. Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, now close supporter of Trump, took time out from impeaching Bill Clinton to co-author three excruciatingly dire alt-history novels about the civil war. In Never Call Retreat, the final in the trilogy, written by Gingrich with William Forstchen and Albert Hanser, the Union side wins the war but, by implication, the south wins the peace. With Sherman’s Union army poised to destroy Atlanta, the Confederate commander, Robert E Lee, persuades the south to surrender. “The patience of our opponents is at an end,” this fictional Lee tells the Confederate government. “We shall reap a terrible whirlwind that will scar our nation for generations to come.” Lincoln then delivers the Gettysburg address to a nation that has, by implication, made peace with the slaveowners and the ideology of white supremacy they lived by.

While you ponder the parallels with today, consider this statement from [Steve] Bannon, made on his radio show in December 2015 to explain the worldview of his Breitbart website: “It’s war. It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.”

For Bannon, the No 1 enemy in this “war” is Islam, with China No 2. But there is also a fifth column in America to be dealt with as part of a “global existential war”. For Bannon, this fits into a generational theory of American power whereby the nation fulfils its destiny through a cycle of catastrophic crises: first, the revolution of 1776, then the civil war, then the intervention into the second world war and finally the crisis Bannon intends to provoke through Trump.

In Bannon and Gingrich, then, you have two men influencing the most powerful office in the world whose beliefs about the dynamics of US history could be best described as dangerous bullshit. Bannon fantasises about turning the culture war into a real one; Gingrich about the survival of an undestroyed south. Compared with them, Trump, whose fantasies appear to revolve around women, gold and tall buildings, has a much less dangerous imagination.

- Paul Mason, 'Trump’s advisers want a new civil war – we must not let them have it', Guardian, 6 February 2017

Looking for America, and not finding it anywhere

In March, the Washington Post reported that Trump voters were both more economically hard-pressed and more racially biased than supporters of other Republican candidates. But in September a Gallup-poll economist, Jonathan T. Rothwell, released survey results that complicated the picture. Those voters with favorable views of Trump are not, by and large, the poorest Americans; nor are they personally affected by trade deals or cross-border immigration. But they tend to be less educated, in poorer health, and less confident in their children’s prospects—and they’re often residents of nearly all-white neighborhoods. They’re more deficient in social capital than in economic capital. The Gallup poll doesn’t indicate how many Trump supporters are racists. Of course, there’s no way to disentangle economic and cultural motives, to draw a clear map of the stresses and resentments that animate the psyches of tens of millions of people. Some Americans have shown themselves to be implacably bigoted, but bias is not a fixed quality in most of us; it’s subject to manipulation, and it can wax and wane with circumstances. A sense of isolation and siege is unlikely to make anyone more tolerant.

In one way, these calculations don’t matter. Anyone who votes for Trump—including the Dartmouth-educated moderate Republican financial adviser who wouldn’t dream of using racial code words but just can’t stand Hillary Clinton—will have tried to put a dangerous and despicable man in charge of the country. Trump is a national threat like no one else who has come close to the Presidency. Win or lose, he has already defined politics so far down that a shocking degree of hatred, ignorance, and lies is becoming normal.

At the same time, it isn’t possible to wait around for demography to turn millions of disenchanted Americans into relics and expect to live in a decent country. This election has told us that many Americans feel their way of life is disappearing. Perhaps their lament is futile—the world is inexorably becoming Thomas Friedman’s. Perhaps their nostalgia is misguided—multicultural America is more free and equal than the republic of Hamilton and Jefferson. Perhaps their feeling is immoral, implying ugly biases. But it shouldn’t be dismissed. If nearly half of your compatriots feel deeply at odds with the drift of things, it’s a matter of self-interest to try to understand why.

- George Packer, 'Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt', New Yorker, 31 October 2016

Infecting their enemies with their own sickness

When a leader is both boastful and indecisive, the leadership vacuum is filled by aides who feed into the posturing but compensate for the indecision. [Trump's National Security Advisor, Lt Gen Michael] Flynn fills that Trump-shaped hole perfectly.

But we know where this leads. [Dick] Cheney cherry-picked manipulated intelligence reports to build a case for the war in Iraq that was the single worst US national security decision in a generation. We are still living with its consequences today, with Isis and a global refugee crisis that is unthinkable without the Iraq war.

Condi Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, was unable to control the hawks inside the cabinet, even as she leaned towards the doves. Flynn doesn’t need to control any hawks, because he is leading the pack.

The opportunity for Flynn to cherry pick intelligence is almost limitless. With his public hatred of Islam and his desire to wage a war of religion, the case for military action will be simple inside the Trump West Wing.

It may be time to concede that one of the biggest winners of this election is the twisted and murderous worldview distilled by Osama bin Laden. Unlike Bush and Obama, Trump and Flynn believe we are engaged in a war with Islam, just as al-Qaeda and Isis believe they are engaged in a war with Christianity and Judaism.

The jihadists have infected their enemies with their own sickness. To be fair, this infection had been growing for many years before Trump started running for office. It broke out when Congress – Democrats and Republicans – voted against the closure of Guantanamo Bay. It is obvious in much of the world’s refusal to deal with the Syrian refugee crisis.

But now the sickness has given us Trump and Flynn to escalate a religious-fueled war that is unwinnable.

- Richard Wolffe, 'Michael Flynn will be a disaster as National Security Advisor', Guardian, 19 November 2016