So, he's not entirely sane, but I wouldn't want to have to argue that airport designers aren't evil.
I'm pretty sure the designers of the airport could have made better phallic symbols if that's what they were going for.
Also, his confusion between 'masculine' and 'male' while talking about the horse is grating.
I googled the horse sculpture crushing the artist thing and it apparently happened. I'm going to continue to avoid the Denver airport. Let's just hope somebody does something before it starts tweeting pictures of its many penises.
Which has more penises, George Washington or the Denver International Airport?
I hadn't realized they had abandoned their fancy (longest in the world!) automated baggage system entirely. I guess they're compensating.
I think there are like 30 goddamn phallic symbols in that horse's mane and tail alone.
When he zooms in on the auk as his very first example, I really thought he'd combed all the gift shops and was about to lay 400 million of them on us. The other ones are kind of phoning it in, after setting that bar so high.
9: If it's not an underwater city, they're screwed. Don't they read the internet?
"Some also claim there is a city under the airport to protect the rich and government officials from the possible events of 2012."
Wow, is the revolution scheduled for next year? Great stuff. Has anybody mentioned this to People's Commissar Bob?
After you hit play, there will be a little 'cc' button.
wait, i'm thinking of closed captioning. there was a subtitle. nevermind.
What revolution? It's predicted by the Mayans and Roland Emmerich.
I think I meant CC, not "subtitles". Can subtitling be used that way? It's sub. It seems like it gets used that way.
I'm now curious about how you get to be the third eagle of the apocalypse and whether, if you work hard, you get promoted to second eagle or fourth eagle.
Works for me too.
You know, not that the dude is sane or anything, but why does an artist designing a mural for an airport in Denver put an awk in it? Flightless, marine-living, and extinct all seem like a peculiar fit for an airport in the dead center of a continent.
21.2: I don't know, but stupid things at airports are common. I'd like to lock this guy and whoever designed the seats at O'Hare into a room until one of them convinced the other that he was evil.
Denver is my favorite evil airport. Free wireless internet! Wide open spaces where you can sit without feeling like the proverbial sardine! If that's evil, I want more of it.
When you're a hammer...everything else looks like a larger, more menacing hammer.
In this fellow's defense, he makes a trenchant point when analyzing the mise-en-scene of that first picture, that the inclusion of the auk was deliberate. If showing this video could get 50% of Film 101 students to understand that point, many of my grad student friends would be made glad.
Also, it has to be said that the period in US public architecture from about 1885 to 1925 is characterized by a hell of a lot of swastikas and fasces as decoration. This roughly tracks the nadir of US race relations. Coincidence? I think not.
21: the answer seems to be that the great auk is a very charismatic extinct animal, that has been featured in children's books. I must say, though, that looking at the murals larger makes it hard not to think they were designed to freak out the mentally unstable.
Also, it has to be said that the period in US public architecture from about 1885 to 1925 is characterized by a hell of a lot of swastikas and fasces as decoration.
How widespread was the Aryan/white-power meaning of the swastika before the its use on the NSDAP flag? Wikipedia tells me that Hitler described the flag already in Main Kampf (1925), and that it had been used by the Thule Society. But it was a pretty widespread decorative symbol in other places too.
Also from the wikipedia entry for swastika:
By the early 20th century, it was used worldwide and was regarded as a symbol of good luck and success.
Is 26.2 a joke at the guy in the video's expense? I feel like I'm missing something, here.
One theory on how the Great Auk came to be extinct centers on a people who practiced magic and highly treasured the birds' plumage. These people were, of course, known as wizard auk pluckers.
31: If 1885 is the nadir of U.S. race relations, then I'm an auk.
I don't get 32, but I'm maybe not pronouncing 'auk' right.
Would it help if I told you Stanley is making a pun?
31: No, it's a joke at your expense. But seriously, I don't think the swastikas were supposed to have any malign meaning. The fasces are a little bit more troubling, but I'm guessing a big part of their popularity was the post-Reconstruction ideal of binding the country back together. Note that the throne the statue of Lincoln is sitting on at the Lincoln Memorial has fasces for the front part of the arms.
I think there's a case to be made for that period being the nadir of race relations, given that everything that happened during slavery was worse. There were A LOT of lynchings in that period. And race riots. And discriminatory laws were passed.
Bonus humor from the video: Where he says "a statue of a giant blue fiberglass horse." Do you think it was modeled from life?
I understand he's making a pun. I'm just missing it. It worries me nearly as much as an airport full of penis art.
We should ask a linguist if some people have a cock/auk merger and some people don't.
There's the famous Swastika Laundry in Dublin, which even used a similar colour scheme to the NSDAP.
40: Thanks. I had to say it outloud, once people were away from my door.
I thought the nadir of race relations was in the 1920s and 1930s? In fact, I thought it was called The Nadir with a capital N.
32 is funny, but in the next segment of this guy's video, he goes into detail about the Satanic influence of 1990s alternative rock bands which allowed NBC's CEO to figuratively "lay down his arms" in the fight against evil in popular culture. Just search "Weezer decock Zucker" on YouTube and you're find it.
The fasces are a little bit more troubling, but I'm guessing a big part of their popularity was the post-Reconstruction ideal of binding the country back together.
They were also a general-purpose symbol of justice - the Roman aediles used them. They didn't represent unity at all, they represented the fact that the aedile could have you beaten with sticks. There was an axe in the middle as well, to represent the fact that he could have you beheaded. I don't know in which sense the Lincoln memorial is using them.
43: James Loewen puts the start of it earlier. I think its from the last nail in the coffin of Reconstruction up to the Depression, basically.
Auk cock caulk mocks hawk eagle.
No, I didn't work on this comment for long at all. Why do you ask?
Logan took some trouble to establish the exact year when the nadir reached its lowest point; he argued for 1901, suggesting that relations improved after then. Others, such as John Hope Franklin and Henry Arthur Callis, argued for dates as late as 1923. (Logan, p. xxi) Though the term "nadir" is still used to describe the post-Reconstruction and early 20th century period, the search for the single worst year has been abandoned.
I still say that once you've ended chattel slavery, you can't have a nadir unless you restart it.
The fasces are a little bit more troubling
Wait, really? Fasces are on government buildings and statues and seals and pretty much anywhere you look, all over the US. And the Italian fascist party wasn't founded until near the end of the time period you're talking about. So... I don't get it.
16. All the Mayans predicted for 2012 was that they'd have to reset their calendar, a bit like when a Vehicle Licensing Authority comes to the end of a series of numbers, or perhaps Y2K is a better analogy. If the Rich and Government Officials are building bunkers under Denver airport it's because they Know Something, most likely that their hour has come.
Great Auks, however, have a record of supernatural evil:
It was on the islet of Stac an Armin, St Kilda, Scotland, in July 1840, that the last Great Auk seen in the British Isles was caught and killed. Three men from St Kilda caught a single "garefowl", noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the auk was a witch and the cause of the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick.
45: Per wikipedia, "strength through unity" is a valid interpretation.
I still think it's weird to put the nadir of US race relations in one of the (relatively) few years of American history when it was actually illegal to beat, rape, kill, enslave or sell black people.
Also, his confusion between 'masculine' and 'male' while talking about the horse is grating.
"And may the first horse to fall on top of you and crush you to death be a masculine horse".
And the Italian fascist party wasn't founded until near the end of the time period you're talking about.
You're crediting Mussolini with a shred of creative originality here. Assumes facts not in evidence.
they then killed it by beating it with a stick.
Proto fascists, clearly.
51: The Mayans hadn't seen the Denver airport so what did they know.
As US symbols of power go, I'd argue that the fasces is among the most troubling. Obviously, yes, all those Americans who were using the fasces to decorate public buildings prior to Mussonlini's rise to power were not thinking of a connection with Italian Fascism. But it seems virtually certain that they were intending to compare the US favorably to the might and reach of Rome. There's a picture in the Wiki article of Cincinnatus holding a fasces. Can't get much clearer than that. So, while you could say that "strength through unity" and "the grandeur that was Rome" are not such horrible things to connect with, metaphorically, I think that they aren't as positive as "the torch of Liberty" or "the glory that was Greece" either.
55: But it's not clear that earlier uses of the word in Italy were of the sort that would trouble Natilo, or that would have had much influence in public architecture in the US. I think fasces as decoration in the US have usually been more about emulating classical models than about anything related to contemporary European politics.
Okay, but it's not troubling in the 'fascism' sense of troubling -- pretty much equivalent to any Roman-derived architecture on the troublingness front.
53: But it was the period where we went from having African-Americans freed, granted rights and citizenship, and admitted to the corridors of power to having them barred from those corridors again, their newly-won rights taken away, and beatings, tortures and murders of them go almost completely unpunished.
I've mentioned before that the big developer in town chose to erect an entirely ahistoric false water tower and a huge chrome horse for the shopping center near my house.
I have since learned that he put up two other chrome animals in his other developments: a rooster and a ram.
Really, dude?
59 crossed with 58. Which, yeah, fair enough, US symbols of power clearly owe a lot to Rome.
More troubling still is the city of Cincinnati.
62: Have you seen the statue on the Nebraska capitol?
We can ask Thorn about her local fascists.
61: That's not a nadir. That might be the most negative slope.
The most profound local minimum, perhaps.
But the global minimum would still be before 1865, I'd think.
68: Um, apparently you haven't heard that we have a Black President now? I think it is totally reasonable to say that this period was the worst it got between the end of slavery and the present. Before it you have the gains of Emancipation and Reconstruction, after it you have the slow desegregation of most parts of society, plus improvements in standard of living and access to elite arenas. That's not to say that slavery was not much, much worse, of course it was, but I think the argument is that slavery was a singularity that doesn't really admit of being compared with anything post-slavery. Also, this is not to say that there haven't been, and won't continue to be setbacks. At my most pessimistic, it certainly does seem like things have been getting worse again in many ways. What good does a Black President do you, after all, if your friends are dead, you've dropped out of high school, and your future is menial jobs or a return to the recuperated slavery of the prison system? At the same time, we don't have 50,000 Klansmen marching down the street in DC, nor is the KKK leadership welcome in the Oval Office, as they were during the period described above.
71: I think the "after the end of slavery" premise is what hadn't been made clear.
I think it is totally reasonable to say that this period was the worst it got between the end of slavery and the present.
Yes, I think that is very reasonable. It is also not what you were saying before.
I don't care about being pwned so long as I don't become an auk.
The Rome the early American revolutionaries were mainly comparing themselves to was the (kingless) Republic, not the caesared-up Empire: Cincinnatus was revered because he gave up power and returned quietly to his farm. (And Washington was known as the American Cincinnatus because he didn't try and make himself king, or even much of a kingmaker...)
Obviously it was all different after Aaron Burr shot Hamilton...
Cincinnatus was revered because he gave up power and returned quietly to his farm.
Fortunately, he lived without knowing of either helicopters or domesticated turkey.
two other chrome animals in his other developments
Does he have a cousin whose business is selling chrome animals? Chroming is a big deal anyway-- making Chicago's Cloud Gate or whatever the bean's official name is, making that was a challenge. You have to cast sections, dip in electrolyte after ensuring zero surface blemishes, rust, or oily bits, and then weld and sand the results.
Where were the chrome animals made?
It appears the Cincinnatus statue in question is meant to depict him handing back the fasces, symbolizing his relinquishing of power as he returns to the farm. Troubling!
73: What was I arguing before?
As US symbols of power go, I'd argue that the fasces is among the most troubling. ... it seems virtually certain that they were intending to compare the US favorably to the might and reach of Rome.
In addition to what tierce said, , strength in unity, many states/citizens forming one nation? Any of this ringing a bell? Yes there's the horrible hypocrisy, baked into the Athens model, of a citizens democracy, where only some people get to be people/citizens, but that's behind rether than in the symbols of republicanism.
Sorry, the missing bit was suppose to be "e pluribus unum."
80: Your 61 to 53 seems to argue against the period of actual slavery being the worst period.
As US symbols of power go, I'd argue that the fasces is among the most troubling
The eagle is even more directly associated with Rome, and specifically with the Roman army rather than with any republican virtues.
we don't have 50,000 Klansmen marching down the street in DC
Right. Things are weirder now.
73: Here's what I said:
26: from about 1885 to 1925 is characterized by a hell of a lot of swastikas and fasces as decoration. This roughly tracks the nadir of US race relations.
38: I think there's a case to be made for that period being the nadir of race relations, given that everything that happened during slavery was worse. There were A LOT of lynchings in that period. And race riots. And discriminatory laws were passed.
46:James Loewen puts the start of it earlier. I think its from the last nail in the coffin of Reconstruction up to the Depression, basically.
61:But it was the period where we went from having African-Americans freed, granted rights and citizenship, and admitted to the corridors of power to having them barred from those corridors again, their newly-won rights taken away, and beatings, tortures and murders of them go almost completely unpunished.
Even if we allow that there was a small degree of ambiguity in 26, as I did not explicitly say "...except for slavery" or "In the post-slavery history of the US..." or something like that, I'd argue that it's a terribly uncharitable reading of 26 to say that I was either ignoring or minimizing the horror of chattel slavery of Black people in this country. Maybe, if this was coming from someone who was completely unknown to you, it could be one interpretation, but even then I would argue that the context makes it pretty clear what my political position is. Given that you DO know me, and have a fairly extensive knowledge of my politics, it just seems absurd to think that I could have meant anything different than 71.
I can't believe Natilo is this defensive about being ignorant about slavery.
Natilo, I think it's mostly the bit you quote from 38 that was unclear. You say that period (1885-1925) was "the nadir of race relations" in the same sentence that you mention slavery. It's unclear what you're saying about slavery, but it could be read as saying "everything that happened during slavery was worse" in 1885-1925 than it was under slavery. If it isn't read that way, it's a self-contradictory sentence. So, I couldn't figure out what you were arguing.
And no, I don't think you would minimize the horror of slavery, but I do think you would make strong and kind of arbitrary claims mostly for the sake of being provocative, e.g. "1885-1925 was worse than slavery."
81: This perhaps does call for a little bit more elucidation. Yes, I am aware of Washington as "the American Cincinnatus", and related references to the ideal of the Roman Republic. However, and I think this is key, by the time we get to the period described in 26, we're not talking about Jeffersonian yeoman farmers building pseudo-Greek temples. Rather, we have a country that has already fought several wars to expand its influence and add to its territory. This is the period where we saw the Spanish-American War, and the suppression of popular movements in Cuba and the Phillipines, which were unambiguously imperialist. I think it is essential to draw a distinction between what regular people or revolutionary intellectuals might have thought at the beginning of the 19th century, and what the people who were commissioning state capitols at the end of the 19th century were thinking.
87: I didn't think you were down playing slavery. I'm very picky about how the term nadir is used.
Looking at the larger mural that Sifu linked, I'm inclined to think that this guy's analysis may be off, but his conclusion is at least partly right; it's totally evil.
The bull on the far right is obviously an allusion to the cult of Mithras by way of Guernica.
Given that you DO know me, and have a fairly extensive knowledge of my politics, it just seems absurd to think that I could have meant anything different than 71.
In the interests of harmony, I think what's going on here is the combination of some legitimately confusing sentence structure, as essear says, and that your more radical politics incorporate enough stuff that looks weird from a mainstream liberalish perspective that my first reaction on seeing something really bizarre from you isn't "must be a typo" as it would be from someone else, but more like "wonder if there's an argument that makes that make sense," if you see what I mean. Not exactly lack of charity, as willingness to accept something really surprising at face value and follow up on it.
89: Maybe I am just blinded to some obvious grammatical error, but I am truly mystified that anyone could read 38 as saying anything other than "Slavery was worse than anything post-slavery. After slavery, race relations were at there worst in 1885-1925."
This smacks of "you thanked Hitler!" to me.
38 is confusing if you drop the "that" and add an extra comma after slavery. If you read what's written, though, I think Natilo's got a clear case.
I'm still impressed that he could write 38 clearly when he's never heard of slavery, though.
Well, no, given that in 38 you say "given that everything that happened during slavery was worse", you sort of have to grant the point. But 26 doesn't mention slavery at all, which, I think, you will concede. All parties should concede that the present discussion is idiotic, though, and even the more het up among us will thus drop it without ceremony, immediately.
All parties should concede that the present discussion is idiotic
This. And that it didn't look to be motivated by any actual belief that Nat was likely to be downplaying slavery -- more a combination of what I said in 94 and little-bitchery-type nitpicking.
Wait, why was Natilo thanking Hitler?
Anyone who downplays this conversation has never heard of slavery.
I'm dropping it, but not because it's idiotic. That's the part of it I enjoyed.
95: The point is that the sentence
I think there's a case to be made for that period being the nadir of race relations, given that everything that happened during slavery was worse.
starts out by saying "that period" (1885-1925, apparently) was "the nadir," meaning the worst; the next clause says that slavery was worse. So it's incoherent. If by "nadir" you mean "second-to-lowest point," it all makes sense, but that isn't what "nadir" means.
But yes, the discussion is stupid, so I'll stop being a little bitch now.
Some of my best friends have never heard of slavery.
Nadal means to pick one's butt.
I wonder how many people have drowned because "nada" can mean both "nothing" and "you swim."
104:It's arguable.
Racism, attitudinal and institutional, possibly hit a national peak 1875-1925 or so. Indiana sent troops to fight in the Civil War but was a center of the KKK in the twenties. Slaves had sympathetic allies in the North. Blacks were materially better off, so I guess we need to define "race relations."
Dixie used their veto power to corrupt the north, demanding that the hotels, military, etc be segregated, gradually getting the decent North to rationalize their submissions. Sound familiar?
Now that roughly 50% of black males are in prison or underemployed, are we in another low point? I was thinking last night about how Malcolm X would respond to:"Great liberal achievements! Voting rights act and a black in the WH. Too bad about those black male numbers."
Malcolm would not even be surprised.
On the first day of class in 11th grade, my spanish teacher needlessly humiliated a new student who shouldn't have been placed in Spanish 3 over the two meanings of the word "nada".
She asked him (in spanish) what he'd done over the summer, and he said "I haven't had spanish in two years". She said "In spanish, please!" and kept talking spanish to him. Finally he answered "nada."
Then she started saying back to him, in Spanish "Oh, you swam? You went to the beach?" etc. She drug this out for like ten minutes, with the kid looking like he wanted to die. She made a big enemy out of me that day.
(She and I fought constantly, and she wrote me up all the time for idiotic infractions, and I'd provoke her by committing itsy-bitsy infractions constantly. Like pretending I didn't notice that I'd missed the trash can when I threw out some trash. I got written up for that, and I feigned innocence the whole time. I was a pain in the ass.)
111: My Spanish teacher annoyed me greatly also. She tried to teach me Spanish.
Natilo backed away from his swastika remark too soon. The early 20th century worldwide vogue for swastikas didn't come about by chance and was not isolated from racialism. Volkisch movements, and the use of archaeology to scry into the past for one's own connections to exalted racial types with the correct shape of skull, were still very much in the air. The swastika became popular after Heinrich Schliemann claimed, in his 1875 publication Troy and Its Remains, that it was a "good luck symbol" of the Proto-Indo Europeans, which at that time meant in the popular sense "the original Aryan master race*." As Schliemann slowly leaked into popular consciousness, that was the sense in which the swastika became a widespread symbol for everything from boy scout troops to mining companies throughout the West, a little historical detail the "take back the swastika" types today tend to rather gloss over.
Many groups abandoned the symbol when Nazi Germany took it up, but that wasn't necessarily because of Nazi racial ideology; it was because it was bad branding to be sporting something that looked like the current enemy's flag on your stationery. The fasces was more generally-used, and earlier, so it escaped a similar symbolic contamination.
(* No, the Nazis didn't invent the concept of "master race"; that's another unsavory bit of common western history that's now conveniently attributed to them in order to expiate more widespread guilt.)
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Yglesias has lot me, and apparently most of his other commenters. I am not putting all my life and times up on Facebook or Twitter so I can snark at him.
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114: Isn't it a bit different for the Hindu set? Or is that only the backward one?
116: The Hindus and the Buddhists still get a pass, sort of. The Buddhists, anyway, mostly. The swastika is mainly an upper-caste phenomenon in Hinduism and thus implicated in what might justly be called a much older form of racism / classism; and the racialized-in-the-Western-sense use of the swastika has been at play in India as long as anywhere else (Hindutva nationalists are even prone to using and admiring the symbol in its specifically Nazi sense). So it isn't quite as neutral and uncontroversial in that context as some seem to think it is. Quite the reverse.
Many groups abandoned the symbol when Nazi Germany took it up, but that wasn't necessarily because of Nazi racial ideology; it was because it was bad branding to be sporting something that looked like the current enemy's flag on your stationery.
Scientific racism suffered a simlilar fate. It was popular in the US academy from the teens up through the early 1930s and abandoned in small part because it ran up against developments in sciencetific thinking, such as the slow discrediting of eugenics in biology, but in large part because of its association with Nazi ideology. The US didn't suddenly become less racist, but it sure didn't want to be seen (or to think of itself) as the same kind of racists as the baddies.
Final argument: Using "race relations" to describe a period when one race held another as chattel is something of a category error, in that implies a mutuality which is not actually present.
Anyhow, I don't have time to worry about Abu Nidal or any of that stuff right now, as I got in to work to find that the good computer had crashed again, and the work around I used last time to uncrash it does not seem to be working at all today.
And I have a meeting at 3 for which I was supposed to prepare documents on that computer.
This is not worse than slavery, but it is ruining an already bad day where I am supposed to go over to middle-of-nowhere St. Paul tonight to plan/have an intervention with my heroin-addict friend.
Sorry for BingSALB, Natilo. But I was honestly confused, early in this thread, about what you were saying.
There was a big anti-animal-experimentation movement in the US at the same time as the temperance movement, just after World War I, and one of their trump cards in terms of public opinion was to point out that the scientists doing such experiments in the US were largely trained by Germans or at least revered Germans as the originators of cutting-edge medical science in general.
I just read a pretty good book about how Prohibition ever passed and then got repealed. It was a strange era. Prohibition seems so ridiculous now. But there was a time when whether you were a Wet or Dry would have been a big part of your identity. The Dries had a lot going for them: women's sufferage and workers' rights and stuff I'd have sided with. The Wets were rich plutocrats and stuff. By current standards, it is a very strange bundling of issues. Contemporary me would have been very conflicted back then.
By current standards, it is a very strange bundling of issues.
I'm reading Persopolis, about the Iranian Cultural Revolution, and having a similar visceral reaction between the Shah and the replacement guys.
Also, the Dries were in favor of birth control and stuff. WHAT DO I DO??!!??!!
101: Kids in the Hall reference
120: No big deal.
Clearly, both sides wanted to be aligned with stuff.
122: I'd have been a Moist. Or perhaps a Damp.
122: Try thinking about the Scopes monkey trial. Bryant seems to have been anti-evolution partially for religious reasons, but also out of political opposition to Social Darwinism, which shows good sense on his part. It's sort of hard not to sympathize with him.
124: They were trying to persuade the Irish, but got the preference rankings really wrong.
128: I may have mentioned this before, but my $250/month efficiency in college used to be his brother's house. I didn't actually check, but the landlord said.
Weren't we talking about Prohibition awhile ago when someone (Emerson?) mentioned that there was a real problem with working-class men drinking up all their paychecks the night they got them, leaving their wives and children hungry? I think Emma Goldman talks about that, although I don't think she was ever for Temperance as an ideology. She also talks about how supporting contraception means preventing abortions. Which, of course, is still kind of a radical position for a significant, crazy plurality in this country. Sigh.
Turn-of-the-nineteenth-century scientific racism is rough too. Lots of it is garden-variety racism looking for a scientific excuse, but some of it looks like otherwise decent people who bought into the race science of the time as being, you know, reliable science. Someone like Jack London, from the rest of his politics, probably wouldn't have been a racist at all if he were fifty years younger, but at the time he was writing it was a scientific, 'progressive' sort of thing to be.
drinking up all their paychecks the night they got them
"When you're hammered..."
I know all the words to Father's a Drunkard and Mother is Dead, which would likely tip the balance.
I meant turn of the 19th/20th century. What's a good word for that time period, now that 'turn of the century' is ambiguous? Edwardian sounds wrong if I'm not referring to the UK.
What's a good word for that time period, now that 'turn of the century' is ambiguous?
"Progressive Era" is one term that gets used some, although it has political connotations that may not be appropriate in all contexts.
Apparently (I'm using this vague word because I read something authoritative-sounding on this, but have forgotten where and don't have time to look it up) there's considerable evidence that Prohibition was a significant public health benefit to the USA; the offsetting costs in corruption and crime may look worse in retrospect, but American cities were already pretty dang corrupt pre-prohibition.
I mean, I don't want anyone to take away my Manhattans or anything, but still.
There's the Generation of 98, which is also not what LB's looking for.
Stick with "turn of the century" for 1899-1910, and call the recent unpleasantness the "turn of the millennium".
I like Y2K myself. So from the future!
I just say, "turn of the last century." It doesn't seem to make any sense, taken literally, but it hasn't confused anybody as far as I can tell.
In fact, we should have been sticking with Y2K when we didn't know what to call the Aughts. Y2K2, Y2K8. It sounds like government codes.
The Gilded Age? The Proud Tower Years?
The book said that the Prohibition greatly reduced the quantity of drinking and it never went back up to where it had been. IIRC, it is now at two-thirds of pre-Prohibition levels or something like that.
For lack of a better word, Progressive era is probably still the most common term. (Hell, people still use "Gilded Age" more often than you'd expect for the decades just before the turn of the century.) But as teo says, it's not always the most applicable term, depending on what you're talking about.
The mid-20s supplement to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica has a very long scientific article all about the health benefits of Prohibition: as I recall it comes down very much in favour. It has graphs and everything. (It also has an article trying, rather less successfully, to explain jazz.)
144: It doesn't seem to make any sense, taken literally, but it hasn't confused anybody as far as I can tell.
Must be nice.
140: I remember seeing the same -- that to make Prohibition look like a genuinely bad idea, you had to include the lost hedonic benefits of alcohol into the cost-benefit analysis.
Which sort of worries me about my position on drug legalization. Not enough to make me pro-War-On-Some-Drugs, but worries me.
Maybe we can reconcile our positions on drug legalization and Prohibition by considering the overall culture of use? If the baseline is not constant, every day use, perhaps drugs could be legally used recreationally by most people without much damage. Alcohol consumption hasn't gone back up to pre-Prohibition levels.
I haven't read anything specifically about Prohibition, but my sense has been that it reduced drinking and the various stuff associated with drinking, that it didn't increase corruption per se, but that there was an increase in the kind of organized violent crime that you would expect to see with smuggling, illegal distribution, etc.
Anyway, Prohibition at a national scale was new, but there had been local level prohibition for quite some time before then - dry towns and the like. Oh, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union was, I believe, the largest women's activist organization. Larger than the suffrage movement (with a fair amount of overlap).
Architectural historians sometimes use the term "American Renaissance" to describe the period from about 1890 to 1920 when Neoclassical styles returned to popularity after being out of favor for a while. This was also associated with the City Beautiful movement, the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and the birth of city planning as a profession. The Classical point of reference was definitely Imperial Rome rather than Greece or Republican Rome, which had been the inspirations for previous Classical Revivals in the US (as Natilo noted above). None of this is very useful for general periodization, though.
And for you periodization junkies, the Progressive era is generally thought to have ended, as a distinct time period for the sake of organizing how people look at American history, before Prohibition was enacted.
The WCTU still exists, although it's obviously less influential than it once was. There are also still dry counties in some states.
If they're not still smashing bars with axes, I say they're barely trying.
There are several dry towns around here. And there are some very large and influential pro-temperance organizations (like the marin institute) still active in this country.
158: Airport-penises have sapped the strength of our women folk.
In Hemphill County, Texas, which is on the list, the public library is in the WCTU building, which is apparently still also used by the WCTU. The county courthouse, which is next to the library, also has a monument honoring John Hemphill, who was a senator from Texas in the 1860s who supported secession and became a delegate to the Confederate constitutional convention. On the back there's a description of Texas's role in supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War. (Just to bring us back to the whole slavery thing.) The monument was placed by the state in the 1960s.
That's a part of Texas where offering beer to roofers may not be considered appropriate.
that it didn't increase corruption per se
False. Okrent's Last Call is a really good read, goes into detail about exactly how this worked and how difficult it was to keep enforcing authorities clean.
"Fin de siècle," but that's primarily for the 1890s.
On Megan's "Alcohol consumption hasn't gone back up to pre-Prohibition levels," from the sources I can find it did, but not until the 1960s. They rose even higher in the 1970s and early 1980s, but have come back down since.
That was the book I read! Thanks, lw.
FWIW, I just say "late 19th and early 20th century" when describing some research I'm doing that covers that time period. But it'll probably have to be forced into the whole "Progressive era reform" frame at some point.
I guess I'd have to read Okrent. I wonder how corrupt he think pre-Prohibition American cities were. I don't doubt that the forms of corruption changed during Prohibition.
I added some pictures of the WCTU building to the Flickr pool.
I think that public health is hard to assess. As with drug addiction, heavy users are the ones who damage themselves. During prohibition, alcohol was roughly speaking still available in cities, less so in the country. The public health data that existed was as far as I could tell from Okrent mostly generated by drys.
It's a great book, I'd recommend it unreservedly. Another interesting book about booze, more contempoirary, is this one by Gusfield:
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Public-Problems-Drinking-Driving-Symbolic/dp/0226310949/
He reminds me of Goffman quite a bit.
Okrent does not do an exhaustive before and after comparison of public corruption, but details the after and points out that there were orders of margnitude more illegal money after than before.
Where were the chrome animals made?
I haven't read the rest of the thread, but that chrome horse in the shopping center near Megan's house was, appropriately enough, made in Denver. I don't know about the others, but one of my friends is friends with the artist and helped him drive it out here and install it.
I like the chrome animals fine, but is the artist even a little bit amused at Petrovich's choices? Could your friend ask?
Jack London, from the rest of his politics
I don't know. Have you ever read his short story set in a mental institution? He was quite committed to the idea of superior people in this world.
171: I think he just made the horse. I can ask, though, next I see him!
A usually reliable friend said there are also a rooster and a ram in other developments. I should find out for sure, because I've been telling that portion of the story.
Not a ram! An eagle and a rooster. And another horse, with more flowy locks. Is Petrovich balding? Because he's not subtle.
And clearly, the artist made more! I only ever heard about the horse-story, perhaps because it was memorable driving 1000 miles with a giant chrome horse.
it was memorable driving 1000 miles with a giant chrome horse
You think he had it bad? One of the humans in the car had given up soap as some sort of wacky experiment. P-U!
I don't like Okrent because of his time as NYT Ombudsman and his role in creating the horror that is fantasy sports, but maybe I should give the book a chance.
Okrent was so terrible as NYT ombudsman that his credibility is permanently shot for me. He was so consistently wrong on subjects that I knew anything about that I don't think I could trust him on subjects that I don't know anything.
OT: I know I shouldn't get involved in the latest Breitbart-driven scandal (and I can't imagine why anyone else does) but this Weiner-tweet thing is confusing me. I don't use Twitter at all, so I don't understand it clearly, but the story is that Weiner is supposed to have tweeted a link to the picture of bulging underpants to a particular young woman, right? How does that work? I thought tweets went out to anyone who's following you, not to particular individuals.
There are private twitter messages.
You can direct them to particular individuals, too.
180: Technorati claims hacking is the likeliest explanation.
I too think Tweets are a public medium, but what would I know...
But as far as I can tell, the putative recipient isn't the one who went public with this -- Breitbart got it from some other source, which makes it sound like it was his public twitter feed. Is it like an email where she was, in essence, cc'd? "This tweet goes publically to all my followers, and privately to whateverhernameis"?
Twitter accounts have a public and a friends-locked option -- anyone who wants can follow the first, without your say-so; only those you've approved can read the second, unless someone retweets one of them, in which case anyone following THEM can read it. (They may actually have tightened this up in the last revamp, as it was a bit of a security anomaly.)
And you can send private messages to individuals who've friended you -- the only way the outside world would know about THESE is if the individual passed them on, or if your account was hacked.
Yes, but this Breitbart "scandal" makes me love Barney Frank even more. That can only be a good thing.
The idea is that he accidentally sent a private message as the public feed (think hitting reply all instead of reply), then deleted it. But it's been pretty well shown to have been complete bullshit from the get-go.
185: I'm just still stuck on where this individual woman comes into it. If it's public, she's not involved any more than anyone else who follows him. If it were friends-locked, she's not involved unless she's a friend, and then she's not involved more than any other friend (I suppose she could be his only friend, but other than that), and there'd need to be a story about how it got out (Weiner's friend X retweeted it). If it were a private message to her, you'd think the only way it would be public would be that it came from her.
As I understand the story, the tweet is being publicized by some guy named Wolfe who's not the woman in question, and the woman says she never saw it much less forwarded it to anyone. Leaving the probable hoaxiness of the whole thing to one side for the moment, I don't understand it what sense it could have been addressed to her at all, that this guy Wolfe had it and she never saw it.
The idea is that he accidentally sent a private message as the public feed
But still, where's her name come from? Is it in the text of the tweet -- "Hey [Name], click the link to look at my junk?"
Well, within the public or friendslock zone, you can send a directed respond to someone in particular people using the @lizardbreath feature, which everyone who follows you can read, but is registered as directed at this particular person (and is easy for that person to find when looking back through their own tweetlist). So if he sent it using this, then it would make sense -- except for being beyond stupid. And you don't need to use the @lizardbreath feature for properly private messages, so they're not that easy to confuse with one another.
Okay, that makes sense. Wildly implausible, but at least I understand the allegation now.
192 to 190: the @NAME feature is what I wasn't thinking of.
186: Also, I think Weiner's "I dunno; that might be my dick, but I didn't post it" response is perfect.
Two things puzzle me.
1) I still don't get the pun in 32, even with the vowel merge explanation. Can someone explain it to a thicko?
2) WTF is up with the art at Denver airport? Is the idea that some tired traveller will stare a bit too long at it, flip out and go on a rampage? Or is it to terrify passengers into submission so they don't complain about queuing for security?
From an NYT article about the horse:"We don't want the work to convey things that would make people uncomfortable about flying," Mr. Chasansky said. No art, for example, would be commissioned with a violent theme.
What, you mean like this?
1) I still don't get the pun in 32, even with the vowel merge explanation. Can someone explain it to a thicko?
196.1: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_10_09.html#004168
You may also enjoy his video revelation unraveled, which warns without apparent irony: "If you use condoms you will not be raptured." No kidding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj9UoTbAzPs&feature=relmfu
Just went on a surfing spree to find out more about the "Third Eagle of the Apocalypse", and am back here to note that the assassin of John Lennon was in fact horror novelist Stephen King. There's a book that proves it.
195: Also, I think Weiner's "I dunno; that might be my dick, but I didn't post it" response is perfect.
Absolutely. The whole thing is so absurd, and Weiner is so clearly extremely annoyed by it, that if he hasn't yet rolled his eyes yet on camera, I'm amazed.
Meanwhile, James O'Keefe's outfit has been granted nonprofit status.
that might be my dick
He could get one of those chips implanted, both so he'd always know it was the right dick and for her pleasure.
I never watch embedded videos, but I just looked into the Denver Airport NWO issue. Those murals are horrible. Has anyone here seen them in person?
Vaguely apropos of the Weiner discussion, have people seen the recent Gallup poll results on people's responses to the moral acceptability or non-acceptability of various controversial behaviors?
I say vaguely apropos because it seems to me that Weiner's response to this pseudo-scandal is essentially: "Whatever, there may be pictures of me and my parts in existence, but a person lives a life over time, and keeps it private, and no I didn't send any such picture, and this is stupid."
The Gallup poll results reflect an increasing acceptance of things that were once verboten, and as I talked to a friend about this today, we observed that sheer familiarity, and perceived prevalence, gradually make for an "Ayup" response from people. e.g. Divorce? not so bad. We can't have failed to notice the shift in presidential candidates' responses from "No, I have never ever tried pot, are you kidding?!" to "I tried it, but I didn't inhale!" to "Sure, I tried it and inhaled, but whatever, long time ago."
The relatively recent shift in acceptability of gay and lesbian relations (as the Gallup poll puts it) is accompanied by a simultaneous belief on the part of quite a few that gays and lesbians make up 20% of the population, which is apparently a serious overestimation, though I forget where I read that. However, if people think that 1 in 5 people is gay, that would probably make them decide that maybe it wasn't such a bizarre thing after all.
"late 19th and early 20th century"
Personally, I refer to it as 'La belle epoque'.
Those murals are horrible.
I quite like the one I linked. Just not in an airport. On the streets or, say, in the Imperial War Museum it would be fine.
Who are the first and second eagles of the apocalypse?
I consider the late 20th and early 21st century to be the "belle le triste" epoch.
211: "God invented the game of sex!"
Nice job there, God. Did you get the copyright?
214: Not sure, but I insisted on an IP indemnity clause just in case he didn't.