The Ayn Rand book club you-all are joining with such enthusiasm (or not!) reminded me of this book review in the New Yorker.
The review covers the scholarly controversy related to who actually wrote the Little House on The Prairie series, Laura Ingalls Wilder or her “ghost”, her daughter Rose:
Wilder scholarship is a flourishing industry, particularly at universities in the Midwest, and much of it seeks to sift fiction from history. The best book among many good, if more pedestrian, ones, “The Ghost in the Little House,” by William Holtz, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, explores a controversy that first arose after Wilder bequeathed her original manuscripts to libraries in Detroit and California. Holtz’s subject, however, isn’t Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is her daughter and, he argues, her unacknowledged “ghost,” Rose Wilder Lane.
That’s the controversy. What’s also interesting are the politics:
“Little House in the Big Woods” was a great success, critically and commercially. Seven months after it was published, Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover. His victory bitterly dismayed the Wilders—Rose, in particular. Shortly after the Inauguration, she noted in her journal, “We have a dictator.”
Rose Wilder had been an actual Lefty, but apparently Roosevelt’s election drove her right ‘round the bend to hard Right, and she ended up here:
But, once Rose had exhausted her family history, her creative life was finished. Her last attempt at fiction, in 1939, “The Forgotten Man,” is the story of a working-class hero whose ingenuity has been thwarted by the New Deal. When it was rejected by an editor as artless propaganda, Rose, according to Holtz, argued that she “could not write it otherwise.”
Her parents followed the same sort of ideological journey, from populist Democrats to gun-toting Tea Partiers :
In 1943, the year that Laura published “These Happy Golden Years” (the final installment of her saga), she told a Republican congressman from Malone, New York, “What we accomplished was without help of any kind, from anyone.”
Sound familiar? This does too:
The Wilders had, in fact, received unacknowledged help …… most of all, on the federal government, which had cleared their land of its previous owners.
“There were no people” on the prairie, Laura, or Rose, had written. “Only Indians lived there.” (Hill writes that Wilder agreed to amend the sentence when an outraged reader objected, calling it “a stupid blunder.” It now reads, “There were no settlers.”)
The author of the review mentions that Sarah Palin cited the “Little House” books as her (single) childhood favorite, and that the television series based on the books was Ronald Reagan’s favorite show.
I don’t know if pledging allegiance to the Little House books is one of those “insider” conservative things, like citing Dred Scott when you mean to say “I’m anti-abortion, so therefore morally superior to you, slaveholder” but I just thought the Wilder family political journey, rags to riches, was fascinating.
Brisbane Belff (formerly G. Nelson Buttnergle (formerly Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey))))))
I never knew Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter were governor of Alaska. I learn something every day here.
kindness
I didn’t join the Ayn Rand book club when I saw the post. Honestly I’d have a hard time with the Cliff Notes version.
How about if we start an ‘I Won’t Read Ayn Rand’ book club? Now that’s a club I could get behind.
Martin
Wow, you guys are seriously trying to fuck up my day, aren’t you? I don’t want to think of the Wilders as PUMA/teapartiers.
I haz another sad now.
Villago Delenda Est
I believe that Cyndi Lauper covered this in song, back in the 80’s.
Brisbane Belff (formerly G. Nelson Buttnergle (formerly Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey))))))
@kindness:
I’ll join, too. Will there be hazing? I don’t want anybody paddling my sorry, bony ass.
Martin
@Brisbane Belff (formerly G. Nelson Buttnergle (formerly Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey)))))): Yes, next ABL will jump in here to tell us that once Clara Barton shot a man in Utah, just to watch him die.
KG
conservatives believe, more or less, in an idealized past. that is why they are so bent on undoing the New Deal and so much of the industrial revolution. they honestly believe, but for technological innovation (entirely a product of the private sector, they’ll tell you), the world of Little House was better than the modern world. They are utopian in the worst way, they believe we lived in utopia and that it has been lost.
Alwhite
Thanks, you have given me a new reason to hate LHOtP.
kay
@Martin:
The relationship between the two women is really interesting too, (if sad) Martin, so feel free to disregard the politics, and focus on mother-daughter conflict.
I read and liked the series as a girl, but I don’t think it’s a “favorite” of mine, in the same way “Charlotte’s Web” was or “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.
scav
@kindness: How many in and no one’s brought up going galt on the AR bookclub? Really?
beltane
I loved the Little House series when I was a kid. However, the thing that struck me the most about the Ingalls family is that all their travels were based upon the US government giving them free land and free military protection. I was amazed that the government used to give farms away like that.
Mark S.
Oddly, she was ahead of her time in that regard. If she just had waited a decade, I’m sure Regnery would have published it.
PurpleGirl
As to joining the Ayn Rand book club… no, I think don’t I’ll read her. But I can still contribute the way that I do at Slacktivist, where Fred Clark has been deconstructing LeHaye and Jenkins Left Behind series. (I haven’t read those books either and don’t plan to.) There’s enough about Rand and her beliefs in the common culture that I can follow along.
Gotta read the review before commenting on the Little House controversy. I never the books but I inconsistently watched the TV show.
Violet
I didn’t know that about the Wilders. That kind of sucks. I loved those books as a kid.
Andy K
The Little House books, The Chronicles of Narnia…What’s the next series of children’s books they’ll start to cite? The Twighlight series? Goosebumps?
Zifnab
The Wilders were looking out for their own self-interests. When they were poor, those interests coincided with the social populists of the Democratic Party. When they became rich and successful, they stopped suffering real hardship and started running into the aforementioned “white people problems”.
Not a terrible shock.
What’s frustrating is watching the folks who should be the backbone of a populist movement completely co-opted and corrupted by the folks they supposedly despise.
Watching a blue-collar senior citizen sign on with the party that wants to abolish Medicare, feed Social Security to Wall Street, and let a mortgage lender foreclose on a house he owns free and clear – that’s dizzyingly insane.
Villago Delenda Est
@KG:
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, this formed the basis for a lot of National [bad word eliminated due to spam/moderation issues] ideology in a certain central European country in the first half of the 20th Century. They loved the machine (as applied to warfare) but not so much as applied to agriculture, for example.
Alwhite
@KG:
Yes, this is a manifestation of a sick form of conservatism; the dearly held belief that the past was sooooooooo much better than the present and everything would be wonderful if we would just return to those golden days of yesteryear.
I’m sure that this sickness has been present in every generation since we crawled out of the seas. Some of it is childhood amnesia and some of it is uncritical romanticizing of history. But it always ignores reality.
beltane
@KG: The world of Little House was based upon one of the most massive displays of soshalism ever undertaken by a modern state, i.e. the Homestead Act. We can thank the pioneers for the American notion that life is an all-you-can eat buffet that someone else pays for.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Martin: Sad but unsurprising evidence that the “I’ve got mine, you’re out of luck” mentality tends to follow the money.
Tom Hilton
That is fascinating; thanks for posting this.
She should have tried Ayn Rand’s editor.
catclub
I can think of one extremely well known book that would be more useful to a BJ bookclub: “Nixonland”.
My much less well known choice is “Help”, by Garret Keizer.
I feel that purposely wasting time reading bad books in a book club is non-optimal.
Jules
My favorite kind of asshole, the ones who claim that they never, ever, ever got any help from anyone.
Always BS.
Linda Featheringill
@beltane:
Exactly.
And railroads and stuff like that.
Although I will freely admit that the life of a settler was not an easy one.
BGinCHI
I was hoping at the end of this story that John Dos Passos was going to cane that horrible woman.
Brachiator
The TV show, and even the novels, are better than the doctrinaire political beliefs of Rose, who is considered one of the founding mothers of the modern libertarian movement. I was not a big watcher of the show, but I remember one episode where the Pa Ingalls character broke down into tears at his inability to help his family, with the town ultimately coming to his aid. The show went further than most Westerns in acknowledging how the settlers had to depend upon one another.
I mentioned the New Yorker article in another thread, and another commenter had a great post which mentioned the state sponsored organizations (in South Dakota, I think) which were essential in helping settlers survive, and which get conveniently forgotten by the Randians and their ilk.
Martin
@kay: Both of my kids have read (and really enjoyed) the whole series, so I’ll spare them the colorful backstory. I think it was the first novel (then set of novels) my daughter read, in fact.
@beltane: That’s what brought my family to this country from Ireland. They were supposed to settle in the midwest following some other relatives, but their ship left bound for a southern port, which was blockaded during the Civil War. They were redirected to NY where they stayed, not having the money to travel west during wartime. My great x? grandfather’s first job after landing was to enlist to fight for the north.
Calouste
@ beltane:
I don’t think the Native Americans saw the Homestead Act as soshalism.
Alwhite
@beltane:
Well, no ‘people’ paid for this largess, just the injuns that needed to be ‘pacified’. It cost the original inhabitants their lives but what was that to the settlers?
kay
@Zifnab:
There’s some of that there, the same thing occurred to me, but to be fair, they stayed frugal. Rose bought them a house and they complained that they couldn’t afford the utilities.
They liked the farm subsidies that came about as a result of the New Deal, but they didn’t like the federal regs and control that went along with them.
BGinCHI
@Brachiator: There is also the Grange movement, which is fascinating.
here’s the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Grange_of_the_Order_of_Patrons_of_Husbandry
catclub
@Zifnab: “Watching a blue-collar senior citizen sign on with the party that wants to abolish Medicare, feed Social Security to Wall Street, and let a mortgage lender foreclose on a house he owns free and clear – that’s dizzyingly insane.”
But since it happens again and again and again, it is probably ‘worthy of some study’. Like a book club choice
of “What’s the matter with Kansas”. Rather than Ayn Rand.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jules:
See IT libertarians, who have no clue as to how the entire computer/internet sector got its start.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
Definitely. And of course they ran short of food because they diverted so much of their labor to the war effort.
I am convinced that Denmark had an easier occupation because of the dairy industry. Butter was like gold to the calorie-challenged Germans.
kay
@Martin:
My daughter loved them at 9(her name is Rose, incidentally, but that has nothing to do with THIS “Rose”) but my older son (who was a much bigger reader than her at that age) didn’t.
But, I agree. No reason to bring this in. They’ll know enough reality when they’re older.
Emily
The Ingalls family moves from Minnesota to Dakota in the first chapters of “On the Shores of Silver Lake.” Pa is offered a job by a family member as paymaster (or something) for the RR being built out in Dakota. So it’s not just socialism, it’s nepotism, too.
I must have read those books about 100 times. Thank goodness I was too old for the TV show when it was being aired.
beltane
I must confess that I’ve never read any of Ayn Rand’s novels. Libertarianism was not even remotely fashionable at my urban high school where Dostoevsky was the rage among my geek friends. A friend of my mother once brought Atlas Shrugged into the house and I’ll never forget the way my mother sneered at it and proclaimed “What a bitch”. The picture of Rand on the back kind of freaked me out. She looked crazy like our neighborhood bag lady who used to scream at random passersby.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
My wingnut sister and her dipshit husband have the Little House on the Prairie videos/books on their children’s Amazon.com Christmas wishlist. My other brothers and sisters allow their children to request current stuff like The Family Guy and Avatar-Airbender type stuff, but not the wingnut family.
burnspbesq
@Linda Featheringill:
Not to mention that the Federal courts stood ready to protect their IP against infringement.
geg6
Yeah, my mother told me the story of the how Laura Ingalls Wilder went insane when I asked for one of her books for Christmas (on the recommendation of a friend) as a tween. My mother just hated her, I’m not quite sure exactly why. I’ll guess and say she found her racist against Native Americans. Regardless, there’s a reason we never watched that stupid, insipid tv show when it was on (not to mention that Michael Landon always gave me the major creeps).
Regardless, my sister (an English major who now teaches literature, communications, and education at a local university) now knows the story of the Ingalls Wilders and what nutcases they turned out to be. And in much the same way that I would never give a child any of the Chronicles of Narnia books because of the Christianist propaganda and the hatred of mature females that fairly oozes from the pages, she won’t be buying any of the Prairie books for my niece. Nine-year-old niece is perfectly free to buy them herself or borrow them from the library, but she will have to endure a lecture about the provenance of those novels to go along with them. She’s had to endure the same thing over the Narnia books. Funnily enough, she lost interest in the Narnia books quite quickly; I believe it was somewhere in the middle of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” But she has devoured the Harry Potter series, reading the first six in the last 8 months. She’s almost done with “Deathly Hallows” and I’m proud to say that next on her pile next to her bed is actually two piles: one filled with Mark Twain novels and the other Charles Dickens. A child after my own heart, I must say.
Jeanne ringland
@KG: They don’t recognize what life was like before indoor plumbing and polio vaccines.
Alex Scott
This is interesting. Just last year, I read a biography of Ayn Rand called Goddess of the Market, which talks a lot about Rose Wilder Lane. Rand would often meet Lane for advice and to bounce ideas off of her, and their discussions were instrumental in helping Rand develop Objectivism.
Of course, even Lane had to admit that some reliance on other people was necessary for life on the frontier, which Rand just couldn’t conceive.
beltane
@Calouste: @Alwhite: Of course. That is the underlying truth of the American dream that rarely gets mentioned. White entitlement is the bedrock upon which American conservatism is built.
ed drone
@Martin:
Hear’s you Boys, you’ll take my advice
To Amerikay I’d have ye’s not be comin;
For there’s nothin’ here but war
Where the murderin’ cannons roar,
And I wish I was back home in dear old Erin
“By the Hush” — traditional Irish song concerning the US Civil War
Ed
Jeanne ringland
@beltane: Still did that in the 20th century. My great grandfather gave up his beautiful farmland in the Missouri Ozarks, homesteaded at great cost, because he got a bug about free land in Montana around 1915-1917. He talked my grandfather into joining him in the 1920s and that lasted about 3 years before Grandpa went broke and moved back to civilization (Independence, MO.).
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
If you want to snort loudly enough to alarm your co-workers, I recommend the Uncyclopedia take on LHotP, complete with extensive quotes from Ingalls’ “real” journal. A sample, as the caption to the famous photo of the three young Ingalls girls in gingham dresses:
Zifnab
@PurpleGirl:
My GOD THAT BOOK WAS BAD!
Just staggeringly pedantic and mind-numbingly boring.
I got through about half the novel before I simply couldn’t go any farther. The writing is just out-and-out awful.
It’s like getting slapped in the face with a Bible while being force feed a steaming pile of verbal turds. I mean, I was totally expecting the heavy-handed religious allegory, but they didn’t get within cell phone range of subtle. And everything past that was down hill. Even the basic grammar was bad.
Ugh. Definitely one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
asiangrrlMN
@Violet: I’m with you. I loved the LHOTP series when I was a kid. Fuck. This is more disgruntling to me than the whole Ayn Rand book club thing (because no way in hell I would touch one of her books again).
ETA: They never got help from anyone? That’s staggeringly ignorant. Really. Just goes to show that the ‘Baggers come by their stupidity honestly, I guess.
KG
so, I just clicked over to Hugh Hewitt’s blog, because I was bored and wanted to see what the new outrage de jour was, since Rush himself put an end to applause-gate. Apparently Politico is lurching to the left… and the key piece of evidence is that Joe Scarborogh has been hired as the leading conservative voice for Politico’s front page.
Nellcote
I really liked the books when I was a kid. To an urban 9 year old tales of pioneer children were very exotic. Most of the teevee series seemed to be about lessons on tolerance. Not a bad thing that.
Ash Can
@Tom Hilton:
What editor?
Ailuridae
I don’t know if pledging allegiance to the Little House books is one of those “insider” conservative things, like citing Dred Scott when you mean to say “I’m anti-abortion, so therefore morally superior to you, slaveholder” but I just thought the Wilder family political journey, rags to riches, was fascinating.
But, once Rose had exhausted her family history, her creative life was finished. Her last attempt at fiction, in 1939, “The Forgotten Man,” is the story of a working-class hero whose ingenuity has been thwarted by the New Deal. When it was rejected by an editor as artless propaganda, Rose, according to Holtz, argued that she “could not write it otherwise.”
Coincidence?
Brachiator
Rose, and to some uncertain degree, her mother, appear to have been ideological cranks of long standing. And their family was not uniformly wealthy. Like some Tea Party people, they seemed eager to vote against their own interests.
And Rose got more odd and more cranky as she aged:
Far from being a fat cat looking down at the little people she once lived among, Rose got consumed by the fantasy world that she and her mother had created and which, ironically she help fob off on the libertarians. Ironically apt that “Roger Lea MacBride, her ‘adopted grandson’ and political torchbearer ran for President on the Libertarian ticket in 1976.”
Rommie
I’m afraid to go look now and see if a brilliant mind interprets Bridge to Terabithia as someone getting what they deserved.
Book re-writing seems a popular Wingnut hobby.
kay
@geg6:
To each his own, geg, your call, absolutely, but lots of writers go a little nuts, in all sorts of different ways, and I did like the books: they had all those elaborate instructions on making soap and such, which is what I liked. They were a good read.
Jeanne ringland
@Zifnab: Rich? I thought that they just barely got by for most of their life.
kay
@Ailuridae:
That is just very funny.
And, no, I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Mark S.
@geg6:
She did better than I did when I was her age (or maybe a year or two older). I lost interest halfway through Prince Caspian.
Zifnab
@kay:
Ah, that’s a bit different. Still, the number of regulatory problems you run into typically scales up with the success of your business. I imagine they saw a lot more of FDRs regulation and a lot less subsidies as they expanded.
geg6
@kay:
Well, this is why the niece is given the background when she wants to read something. That’s the benefit of having a literature professor for a mother. She’s free to read literally anything she wishes to. But that doesn’t mean her aunts or parents have to buy them for her. She has her own money to use, if she wishes, and she is taken to the library, regularly, and allowed to take out whatever she wishes. I’m sure that, in a couple of years, she’ll be reading Gore Vidal’s simply scrumptious novels about American history and we’ll all have fun watching YouTube clips of Vidal sounding like a complete asshole.
Jeanne ringland
@Villago Delenda Est: OH Gawd, I started to have that argument with a bunch of young idiots at MS and decided it wasn’t worth it after I’d called them out.
Brachiator
@BGinCHI:
Yep. Yep. Thanks. And here is a bit from the earlier post which touched on Rose Wilder Lane and the Little House years.
General Stuck
OT (but still in Kay’s arena)
Frist Urges GOP to Stop Health Care Repeal
“cuddled” “snuggled” LOL, Pitchforks, Lanterns. Round up the tea tard posse. This kind of limp wrist talk cannot stand.
AliceBlue
Here’s what Dorothy Parker had to say about Atlas Shrugged:
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Anyone romanticizing pre-20th century everyday life needs to read Bill Bryson’s At Home – A Short History of Private Life.
Jeanne ringland
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: You know, there’s nothing really wrong with the books themselves but there is a better book out there than any of the Little House series: Caddie Woodlawn. Better written and fun to read.
It’s too bad that your wingnut’s children aren’t allowed a broader menu of reading material.
geg6
Meanwhile, only slightly OT, but since it’s a recommendation for your reading pleasure…
http://www.esquire.com/features/roger-ailes-0211
morzer
@kay:
Writers go nuts? Madam, I protest. Down our way, it is perfectly normal to clothe oneself in purple and orange and insist that people address one as King Penguin III.
DFS
For those who want to sample the better bits of the series (in my memory, anyway), I recommend Farmer Boy, because it is largely apolitical and laden with magnificent food porn.
morzer
@DFS:
Wesley loved Buttercup, and as he prepared their humble evening meal of Chicken Chasseur….
asiangrrlMN
@Brachiator: Damn. I don’t think I can read those books again or give them to anyone else. I really hope nobody has anything bad on Astrid Lindgren because I adore Pippi Longstocking. Lindgren is Swedish, though, so she’s probably not a ‘Bagger.
@Jeanne ringland: Ooooh! Yes, that was a good book, too.
@DFS: Yeah. It was pretty good, too. Lots of food descriptions.
beltane
@Jeanne ringland: I loved Caddie Woodlawn. But there is that element of class war stemming from the fact that Caddie’s father grew up poor in England and felt a fair amount of resentment over the fact.
Zifnab
@Jeanne ringland: I can’t quote Wikipedia as a definitive source, but it certainly doesn’t look that way to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder#Farm_diversification
Jeanne ringland
@beltane: I had forgotten that bit. I just remember the snotty girl’s jet buttons being eaten by the goat.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: When you say it fast it’s funny!
Hi hon. Today’s lesson: check with your eye doc to see if they’re going to dilate you BEFORE the appointment. I hadn’t had it done in years and didn’t think anything of it. Oops. Four day unplanned weekend I guess.
Mark S.
Could it be? Joementum Unlikely to Seek Re-Election
liberty60
@BGinCHI:
Thanks for the link- I always used to think it odd that places like Wisconsin and Minnesota produced such liberals, but later realized that farmers, instead of being the solitary Galtians of GOP memory, were actually shrewd enough to understand that mutual effort and communal support created prosperity enjoyed by all- from your link:
In the middle of the 1870s, the Granger movement was successful in regulating the railroads and grain warehouses. The birth of the Cooperative Extension Service, Rural Free Delivery, and the Farm Credit System were largely due to Grange lobbying. The peak of their political power was marked by their success in Munn v. Illinois, which held that the grain warehouses were a “private utility in the public interest,” and therefore could be regulated by public law (see references below, “The Granger Movement”). Other significant Grange causes included temperance, the direct election of Senators and women’s suffrage (Susan B. Anthony’s last public appearance was at the National Grange Convention in 1903 [1]). During the Progressive Era, political parties took up Grange causes. Consequently, local Granges focused more on community service, although the State and National Granges remain a political force.
Heh indeedy!
bayushi
What’s fun is comparing the Little House books with the Anne of Green Gables books. They were written of approximately the same time period, but Anne’s time period seems like it must be so much more ‘ahead’, progressively than the Laura books, and yet, there are many of the same dangers: crops destroyed, farms foreclosed upon, etc.
Laura was actually quite resentful: she grew up terribly poor, without adequate dentistry or health care, taken all over the country by a father who was always chasing free land. What they don’t mention in the books was the time on Plum Creek when Laura, not yet 13, was working in a hotel, the death of her baby brother, and the scarlet fever gets barely a mention. Yet, her father only started to become a little prosperous after she was forced into becoming a schoolteacher. There’s a great deal of resentment of Mary in those books: they all sacrificed a great deal to send Mary to college for seven years, so that Mary could come home and sit in the parlor, doing fine crafts for the rest of her life. And it’s clear that her diet is, for the most part, salt pork and cornbread or brown bread, for much of her life. She always came off in the books as being very proud of her family for succeeding at all, and likely didn’t want to admit that there was ever help.
And Narnia’s much better when you read it the way I did: never having a clue of the Christian underpinnings. (I was Jewish, didn’t know any of the New Testament until I was sixteen. I never picked up on the religiousness of those books until someone told me in my AP English class. I was flabbergasted.)
geg6
IMHO, if you want your children exposed to liberal ideas and empathy and love for their fellow man, you can’t do better than Twain and Dickens. A little “Candide” and “Don Quixote” on the side wouldn’t hurt, either, if they are a bit sophisticated as readers.
Those were my favorites as a tween, anyway.
Phoebe
@Alwhite: That is exactly how I feel. I got two of the first one for my 9th birthday, and was all set to love them like everybody else, but I could not get through it. Almost 20 years later, as a proofreader for a children’s textbook publisher, I would get excerpts from it in my tray [our books had a whole lot of excerpts] and they would put me to sleep. Before the end of a single page I would be nodding and jerking like a junkie.
James Howard Kunster is always bitching about how insular, blinkered suburbanites are motivated to flee the cities by a fantasy of “a cabin in the woods” — the fantasy of self sufficiency — which ignores the road system, the sewer system, blah blah blah. The Ingalls people at were much more self-sufficient than their worshipers, but I could never even understand the appeal.
Nobody is self sufficient, not even a houseplant, and we should all just aspire to bring something to the party from which we feast. That is a nice picture to me, people helping each other. Not being all alone in the woods like the unabomber.
BGinCHI
@bayushi: The comparison is also between the US and Canada.
There was also a terrific AoGG TV show (prob CBC).
Only discovered that when I lived in Toronto.
KG
@Mark S.: so, he’s pissed off everyone in his state now? How different history could have been if any one red state in 2000 broke the other way, Joementum could have been the front runner in 2008, assuming Gore was reelected in 2004.
Southern Beale
I grew up on the Little House books and only learned of Wilder’s strong Libertarian leanings later in life. My understanding was that Laura had started out as a strong Lefty but had some big Libertarian ideas which she came to long after she’d become a published author. Never heard that Rose was her “ghost” though. That’s a new one on me.
I remember reading in the Little House books about all of the government help they did get … things like a government program to reforest the prairie, for starters. And she was a public school teacher, was she not?
Anyway, I have a biography of her but I’ve never read it. I wouldn’t say being a fan of the Little House books is a sign of being a Teanut since most of us grown women grew up on those books.
BGinCHI
Seriously, it’s really sad that no one reads John Dos Passos anymore. Any fans out there?
Esp compared to Rand, Wilder, et al.
aimai
@KG:
Of course “Pa” was a total neer do well who had to survive with the help of jobs he took from the railroad since he never stuck around long enough to make much money from actual farming. Also, in real life Almanzo wasn’t a successful farmer and they had to move back east where Laura did a lot of the work to support them. But ah, memories! Still, I loved those books and its very interesting to read The Long Winter out loud to children and explore the absurd propganda elements in it.
aimai
Jeanne ringland
@bayushi: My dad completely missed the blatant religious message in the first book, I don’t know how since he’s a regular church-goer. I had to point out who Aslan represents, and Dad was not old at the time, maybe 56.
He liked that first book but lost interest midway through the series.
licensed to kill time
I’m glad I never knew anything about the personal life and politics of some of the writers of my favorite childhood books because, for one: I wouldn’t have understood or have been able to place it in a proper context, and two: who needs to have their enjoyment of said books colored by what are essentially adult lenses?
There is time enough to get cynical as hell about the world as you get older. I was lucky to grow up in a house full of books and left to discover them on my own (I don’t remember ever being urged to read a certain book, I just picked them up and read on my own) and my parents had friends with houses full of books which I asked to borrow.
One of my parent’s friends was a scientist who had reams of those Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy booklets, another had the whole set of original Oz books with the great colored covers and illustrations, the Narnia books I discovered at home and worked through the whole set, the Little Women and Little Men books, all the Bookhouse Book sets of fairy tales and knights in shining armour…
I guess what I’m trying to say it that there is value in letting kids discover things for themselves and not imposing our judgments on their reading quite yet.
When my daughter was a teenager I despaired of her ever reading decent fiction, as she seemed to be stuck in a Danielle Steele-type vortex, but I never hassled her about it. I was just glad she was reading. Now she reads excellent fiction, just like she loves vegetables now and hated them when she was little. Funny how it often works like that.
Not that I’m comparing books to carrots or anything.
eta: I read that New Yorker article last year and it was very interesting.
aimai
@asiangrrlMN:
Yeah, but she’s not all that pc on the subject of cannibals!
aimai
eemom
goddamn, this shit is depressing.
Although I was an avid reader as a kid I never did get into the LH books. However, my family all gathered faithfully round the teevee every Monday night when the series ran. My mother was a lifelong fan of Michael Landon beginning with his Little Joe days on Bonanza.
How about HIM? Was he a closet teapartier before his untimely death?
Also, what’s this about Mary sitting in the parlor? Didn’t she found the “Blind School” with her hottie husband?
Pangloss
I’m reading “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade” right now and in the on deck position is “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”
I’m with catclub @21. It’s hard enough to remove onesself from the distractions of other obligations to read a GOOD book, why would you waste those precious moments with a bad one?
JZ
I really couldn’t give a rip about the Wilder’s political beliefs. My whole family worshiped LHOP and we all turned out to be a bunch of lefties. Just because two rightwingers cite it as their fav doesn’t mean it’s a dog whistle.
eemom
and one more thing, just so y’all know: ONE WORD against Dr Seuss and I’m going on suicide watch.
bayushi
OH! I also forgot: Rose ended up going to live with Almanzo’s sister for high school, so that she could get a higher education that Laura and Almanzo couldn’t supply. And this was the sister that Laura hated, the one who was a socialist. And Rose was a socialist for a while, too!
KG
I should point out, getting stuck up on the artist’s (be it actor, writer, musician, etc) political leanings is a bit foolish. Enjoy their work and let them have their opinions. I see the same thing from my dad going the other way, he always bitches about Johnny Depp or Striesand or whoever, because they are so liberal and outspoken. If you are so consumed by politics that you can’t enjoy someone’s work because they are whatever they are, then there is something very wrong with that.
BGinCHI
Comcast-NBC merger approved.
Great. Just great.
Yutsano
@eemom: Theodore Geisel was a propagandist during WWII. For the Americans. But his only real black mark was that he agreed with the Japanese internment.
@MikeJ: Teh pot, we done doth stirred it. :)
MikeJ
@eemom: He did draw ethnic people with the stereotypes of his times.
pk
I loved the Narnia books as a child and read them many many times. It came as a complete surprise to find out they were a christian allegory. Loved the little house books too. I always thought pa was shown to have respect for the Indians. Ma was the bigoted one. I still think both sets of books are good reading for children. Kids will assess the books for themselves as they grow older.
Catsy
I was never a fan of LIW, so I can’t say that this shakes up any of my preconceptions. The authors whose imperfect humanity I had the hardest time adjusting to were Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, and Orson Scott Card. Ironically, Niven was the easiest of all of them precisely because the way he injects politics into his stories is so extraneous and tacked-on; it makes it easier to disregard the annoying hippie-punching and libertarian idiocy and enjoy the story. Heinlein was a challenge for me–he was a big influence on me growing up, and it took time to come to terms with his particular flavor of benign misogyny and separate the wheat from the chaff. Orson Scott Card, though, is just a big bowl of WTF with crack-flavored sugar on top. Ender’s Game was and is a masterpiece. Speaker for the Dead was brilliant. But after that the series just got more and more polluted by his religious views and growing descent into wingnut insanity, and none of his other works have ever really appealed to me.
bayushi
@BGinCHI
The comparison isn’t just the US and Canada, though, because if one compares the Anne books with the East Coast at the same time, Anne is much closer to the East Coast, long-settled cities. I’d find it interesting to compare the more out of the way provinces of Canada to the Little House books, though.
@Jeanne
I loved the whole series. But I never truly was able to associate it with Christianity, which is likely more of a failure on my part.
Anyway, I’m a big ol’ Lefty. I find the underlying familial resentment in the Little House books to be more interesting than the politics.
Jeanne ringland
@pk: I never quite knew how to take Laura’s tantrum when the Indians are being moved off of the land (I can’t remember which book) and she demands a particular Indian baby she saw. I think Pa told her to shut up and get inside or something.
aimai
@Catsy:
Catsy, I agree with you about Orson Scott Card. I loved Ender’s Game, liked Ender’s Shadow, couldn’t get through Speaker for the Dead but I had to come to the conclusion that these books were all flukes–that the real Orson Scott Card as revealed in his political and cultural writings, simply wasn’t capable of writing those books. He must have written them under some strong hallucinogens. Because the “real” in this world OSC is a hard core authoritarian with a mean streak a mile wide.
aimai
Old Dan and Little Ann
I’m in the middle of Little House Big Woods right now. After 6 straight years of reading this story I am pretty sick and tired of it. Boooorrrrriiiiinnnggggggg.
Mary G
@KG: This.
I don’t care who likes the Little House books or not; I still do. One of my ex coworkers had a fit when I suggested she read Harry Potter to her kids – didn’t I know it was the devil’s work! Her church had forbidden them! J.K. Rowling was part of the vast media conspiracy to remove Jesus from our lives! OMG!
Now she thinks they are wonderful and that Harry is full of Christian values. She looks at me like I’m crazy when I mention that her story has changed. Sheep.
MikeJ
@aimai:
And that’s not obvious from Ender’s Game? I just read it for the first time, mainly because so many people talk about how great it is.
I realise it’s hard to write milfic that isn’t authoritarian, but I’d much rather read Scalzi than Card.
schrodinger's cat
I haven’t read either the Chronicles of Narnia or The Little House on the Prairie. I grew up mostly with Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde also Chekhov’s short stories and when I was even younger it was Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew.
Brachiator
@asiangrrlMN:
I think you should just read the stuff you like and don’t worry about it. It’s easy to find something unacceptable about a writer if you go looking for it hard enough.
Also, something strange and wonderful often happens with the best writers. Themes, characters, entire novels, veer off in unintended directions. I recall an interview with a noted mystery writer who noted that she had intended a villain to be handled a certain way, and in a crazy way, the character himself told her. “you’re not done with me yet” and suggested an entirely different path.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon5 is a stone atheist, and yet wrote some seriously religious characters into his works because the fictional universe he had created demanded it. He did not need to create a universe that slavishly reflected his political or religious beliefs, or that of his readers. In fact, I recall him having to defend a story precisely because decisions made respected the perhaps repugnant religious beliefs of some of the characters. Made for a damn good story, though.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Duh! (On the eye doc thing). Hope you enjoy your enforced fourth day off.
@aimai: Doh! Shit. Scratch her off my list.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I once did a paper on the Grange movement. I titled it Home, Home on the Grange. Yes, I am that awful.
schrodinger's cat
@MikeJ: Ender’s game was OK, the other books in the series are unreadable, I am not fond of the segregationist universe in the Ender series, the Chinese have their own planet? WTF? I much prefer the ethos of Trekkian universe.
asiangrrlMN
@Brachiator: Midnight Nation is one of my all-time favorite graphic novels (by J. Michael), and it has some pretty strong theological underpinnings. I was mostly kidding about finding out books I like have authors with unsavory beliefs. Mostly.
gene108
@Alwhite:
I can argue the same about liberals, with regards to their insistence that the employment situation in the 1950’s, 1960’s and even the 1970’s was sooooo much better than it is today, that we should revert to the pre-Reagan tax code, increase union membership, and increase regulation (return of Ma’ Bell?), like they had in the past.
I think everyone is a bit guilty of having a selective memory, with regards to thinking the problems of today didn’t exist in some form or another in ages past.
canuckistani
@kay:
I won’t tell you what flashed into my head when you mention extreme right-wing cranks in the 30’s and 40’s writing about making soap. But I wonder what happened to the Goldbergs in their little cabin down the road…
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: I hope the only reason you didn’t get an A was the title. Pure grade A Dutch gouda there my man.
@asiangrrlMN: Four hours later things are STILL fuzzy and my eyes STILL hurt. Crap. I’m getting close to crankiness territory with this.
morzer
@canuckistani:
Jeffrey was a good Goldberg and they all got ponies from a rich Yankee publisher, as I recall.
Sharl
Rose Wilder Lane wrote a book, Peaks of Shala, that came out in 1923, a travelogue of her recently concluded travel through northern Albania – then and now, a rough neighborhood. I really liked that book, and hope it gets reissued someday.* While RWL came off in it as tough and very bright, though also a bit eccentric, I don’t recall the same creepy vibe emanating from her that characterized Ayn Rand. Maybe she became nuts in her later years; that I don’t know, although information here suggests that was the case.
One thing I do seem to recall, is that her more sober observations of the Gheg tribes was replaced by a fangirl adulation upon meeting the Gheg tribal chief who would later become King Zog (or Zogu; eventually toppled by Mussolini’s army). It appears that swooning adoration of authority figures is a major characteristic of the libertarian mindset, or at least a major subset of that crowd. (I think others here have alluded to this already.)
*I read it over 30 years ago, but rather than trust my memory, here’s a more recent review which is compatible with what I seem to recall about it.
morzer
@Alwhite:
Actually, this belief in a bygone golden age is a feature of all conservative societies and cultures. You can find this idea in Hesiod (from whom the whole Golden Age nomenclature descends), and, for that matter, in Confucius with his reverence for the bygone sages and wise kings of yesteryear.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Juvenilia happens to all of us.
Catsy
@schrodinger’s cat: I didn’t see that as segregationist so much as nationalist. At the time of Ender’s Game, humanity was still fractured along national borders much the same as it is today. The Hegemon and the Bugger threat united the world, but didn’t do much to change the nationalism and xenophobia of so many cultures. Consider how China behaves now. Do you really think they’d want anyone else on their world if they had a say in the matter?
I don’t like it in the sense that it doesn’t appeal to me as a world I’d like to live in, and Xenocide was far from my favorite novel, but the segregation along cultural lines was internally consistent.
BGinCHI
@gene108: Then what does the “conserve” part of “conservatism” mean?
Turn off the lights when you leave a room?
Catsy
@gene108:
Uh, no. This is a false equivalency.
An assertion that employment was better at X time and that we should tax income at the levels that were in place at X time are policy prescriptions that can be described in absolute terms, not nostalgia. Advocating that we should strengthen union membership and government regulation of X are specific recommendations of policy or strategy.
None of which are even in the same category as ahistorical and unquantifiable whining about how we need to return to an unspecified (and nonexistent) time when Things Were Better.
Which is, you know, what we’re actually talking about here.
gene108
@geg6:
I had a friend, who tried reading the Harry Potter books, but had to stop because she was offended by the early books casual attitude towards (1) the house elf’s tendency to hurt itself, because she knew people who had problems in dealing with things and hurt themselves in response and (2) it’s casual attitude towards the child abuse Harry has to deal with from his aunt.
I’m not sure how many children’s books are devoid of some type of situation that might offend someone, but I bet quite a few have their warts.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: I did get an A. So there.
Dilation of my eyes renders me utterly useless for about 6-8 hours. On the other hand, I was just diagnosed with an inner ear inflammation; I have had a cold which has led to dizziness. They prescribed antivert, and it knocks me out. I napped for two hours this afternoon.
@BGinCHI: It amused me.
TR
@gene108:
Yes, but our remembrances of the past have the added value of being, you know, correct.
You know when the top marginal tax rate was at its absolute highest? 1953. It was a whopping 94%, which according to conservatives today, must have meant the job-killing government was job-killing all the jobs that could be killed, even the job of job-killing.
And yet unemployment that year — the same year that the top marginal tax rate was at its highest in the postwar era — was at its lowest in the postwar era, hitting a rock-bottom low of 2.5% in the summer of 1953.
And yeah, union membership was triple what it is today back then, which led to the horrors of working-class people being able to buy a car, a house and other consumer goods — a radical concept advanced by that notorious communist Henry Ford.
And yeah, the government regulated industry. And it thrived.
So, yeah, the economic situation was better back then.
Thanks for reminding us all that when liberals pine for the past, they actually have a clue what they’re talking about.
Yutsano
@gene108: She definitely should not read any Roald Dahl then. That will definitely get her knickers quite twisted.
@Omnes Omnibus: I did select a decent cheese to compare it to, so there is that. Then again I like most cheeses except goat. Never have taken to any goat cheese I’ve ever had.
Whatever he used on my eyes was some STRONG shit. And I haven’t been dilated in years. I have no idea how I managed to drive home like this. I think my only saving grace there is the office is so close.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Yeah. I hear you. Take a nap or play with kitteh if she’s forgiven you.
theturtlemoves
@Brachiator: The book from whence I stole my moniker has one of the mostly profoundly spiritual endings I’ve ever read and was written by an atheist, as well. Well, he says he is, but I get the impression Pratchett would be perfectly happy if there really was a world on the back of a turtle and Death beckoned us to walk the black desert into the unknown.
Jager
If you want to know what life was like in a real little house on the prairie, read Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, wasn’t anything like the Wilder families experience.
Jeanne ringland
@Phoebe: I own a cabin in the woods, and it is hooked up to the local soshullist sewer system.
PurpleGirl
It’s interesting to read what other commenters read as children and how they came to that material. I was allowed to go to the library by myself and usually spent Saturday mornings there. I’d read a few books there and take home a stack to read over the coming week. My parents didn’t supervise my reading. I explored the library shelves as if looking for treasure. I didn’t read the Little House books or the Narnia books. I did read history and folk tales and science. And novels if the titles peaked my interest. The other way I got books was to buy them from Scholastic’s My Weekly Reader service in elementary school. I’m sorry I no longer have any of those books. But when the bulletin was handed out in class, I’d read the blurbs closely to decide what I wanted. When I was allowed to use the Adult section of the library, there was even more stuff to explore.
srv
Kay,
There’s a whole Ludwig von Mises Institute video on this.
I hope you and Doug enjoy watching this repeatedly.
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
I ran across a British review of a biography of Geisel which I cannot track down just now (dammit), but while not pardoning Doc Seuss, I give him credit for complexity (one bio reference here). The child of German immigrants whose family ran a brewery, Geisel was himself the target of some nasty anti-German bigotry during World War I, and some cheap shots during Prohibition. And the Wiki notes that he was seriously anti-Nazi when some Americans and American heroes like Charles Lindbergh were serious admirers of this despicable crew.
Like I said, I am not even going to excuse his anti-Japanese stuff, except to say that it’s just sad that a man who could recognize bigotry against Jews and blacks could not include Japanese Americans in the mix.
As an aside, what do we do about someone like Earl Warren who, as governor of California, participated in the mistreatment of Japanese Americans, and yet came through during the Civil Rights era?
PurpleGirl
@Jager: I read Giants in the Earth at the recommendation of my Norwegian pen pal. It is a great book. IIRC, it was written in Norwegian and then translated into English.
Jeanne ringland
@theturtlemoves: I love Mr Pratchett and especially Small Gods. I gave it to my atheist brother-in-law and he loved it too, and it’s possibly one of the best books about religion and what religion ought to be.
Terry is a hoot and I think you’re right about him being happy meeting DEATH, as would I.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jager:Eric Sloane’s Diary of an Early American Boy is quite good as well.
srv
Oh, and Laura Ingalls gave up on the conquering the free land in the Dakotas and moved to the Ozarks.
morzer
@Jeanne ringland:
I’ll put in a plug for Fritz Leiber’s story “Lean Times in Lankhmar”, if we are talking visions of how religion works.
catclub
@gene108:
Would this person also object to Jonathan Swift’s casual treatment of cannibalism in “A Modest Proposal”?
theturtlemoves
@Jeanne ringland: I get weepy every time I read ‘”But I’m me,” he said. Vorbis stood up, uncertainly, and followed Brutha across the desert.’ Completely profound take on forgiveness not for the sake of getting a reward in the next life, but because being forgiving is who you should be.
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub: Of course not. It is fine if happens to the Irish.
geg6
@gene108:
Just to be clear here, to you and everyone else, no one dictates to my niece what she can and cannot read and every children’s or young adult book has things in it some could object to. What my sister and I believe is that context matters and in the case of literature, the context is the author and where the author is coming from. It may not be important to everyone, but we think it matters. And my niece, a quite precocious and frighteningly intelligent young lady, is curious about these things, understands them, and is sophisticated enough to still read stuff whose authors we may criticize with enjoyment and critically enough to articulate why she may agree or disagree with her mother’s or my assessments.
That said, I can’t wait until she starts on the Dickens and Twain. I really look forward to what she has to say about them.
Jager
@PurpleGirl:
Rolvaag was a Norwegian immigrant who worked on farms when he came to the US and was a department head at St Olaf’s college. His son Karl was a pretty damn good governor of Minnesota. It is a great book.
My Dad’s Mom was the granddaughter of a very early Dakota Territory pioneer gave me the book when I was about ten…my daughters who loved “Little House” read it and got a reality check.
My gram grew up knowing people who still had the sod houses on their farms. On her original homestead the frame house was built on the site of the original sod house, my great grandmother lived in a tent while the house was built, she hated the sod house with a passion,apparently she told old Knute she wouldn’t start a family until he built a proper home! He was probably desperate for some “comfort” because they had Grandma’s dad about 9 months and 2 days after the house was finished.
gene108
@BGinCHI:
If they are serious about fiscal conservatism on a personal, yes. One should always turn off lights in the house they are not using because it wastes money.
@Catsy:
I disagree. It depends on the type of job you have and your race and gender. For unskilled labor, the job market doesn’t look good. On the other hand, for people with skills and the drive to get the most out of their careers the job market offers opportunities not available in earlier eras.
People are no longer beholden to some large corporate entity for the duration of their careers, where they eventually reach a ceiling they can’t cross. There is a certain amount of flexibility and the ability to move into new areas, you had not worked in before in the current job market, where you can increase your earning potential beyond just clocking in for the same company for 30 years.
I’ve never had to deal with unions, so I don’t have a strong opinion about them one way or the other.
I’m not sure how you would bump up union membership, when unions typically focused on manufacturing and the labor needed for manufacturing has declined. The U.S. is still has the largest manufacturing segment of any nation in the world, though China is catching up fast.
I think as labor needed for manufacturing declines, the role of unions would also decline. The Service Employees union has managed the transition into the new economy, but I’m not sure there’s as strong a roll for unions to play in a non-manufacturing economy.
As far as regulations go, what exactly does “strengthen government regulations” mean? I don’t think liberals have thought this through. President Carter started deregulation of a lot of industries, like the airlines and beer breweries and President Reagan presided over the deregulation of the telecommunications industry.
Does stronger regulations mean a return to the era of “Ma’ Bell” and limited beer selection?
I can understand wanting more stringent environmental standards, but the underlying problem of excessive consumption needs to be addressed, in order to really scale back polluting industries and I don’t see exactly where government can regulate us to consume fewer resources.
Sure you can push for solar panels and wind mills to be put on buildings, but that’s not a large scale solution. It would reduce consumption of fossil fuels but not reduce the consumption of products from other heavy industries, such as mining for silica to make solar panels.
I don’t know, the baby boomer conservatives I know have a pretty clear idea of what they want to return to. They want an America of their childhoods, where kids played outdoors, in the woods, which hadn’t yet been turned into subdivisions and mini-malls, until dark, for example.
I think any failure to embrace the benefits of change and harp on how much better things were yesterday is the same. Whether it’s for the activities of your childhood or an economy that had few true opportunities for women and minorities, despite providing greater job stability.
celticdragonchick
@aimai:
I live not too far from him here in Greensboro. I know he patronizes some stores where my spouse works. His local review column is interesting, but also a bit too revealing at times. He really does come off like an asshole with his policy to upbid on merchandise that has been held for somebody else…and that doesn’t even touch his NOM bullshit.
gene108
@catclub:
A Modest Proposal isn’t usually read by 8-12 year olds, so I don’t see how it is relevant.
It isn’t pedaled onto the public as a “safe” for parents to let their children read, because there’s nothing in it to offend anyone’s moral sensibilities.
Omnes Omnibus
@gene108: FWIW I read it during the summer between 6th and 7th Grade, the summer I turned 12.
ETA: I also read Gulliver’s Travels that summer.
gene108
@geg6:
I just pointed out something about the Harry Potter books I hadn’t realized on my own, until it was brought to my attention. I found it interesting because when I pick up a children’s book to read, even as an adult, I operate under the premise that it’s “safe” from any serious moral ambiguity or assault on my moral sensibilities. Especially a book that has such wide commercial appeal as the Harry Potter series.
@TR:
Oh please, back in 1953 government agencies that regulate industry like the EPA and OSHA didn’t exist. There was much less regulation of industry than what happened after the environmental movement of the 1970’s.
Your correlation of taxes to employment has nothing to do with the actual cause of low unemployment during the 1950’s.
The rest of the world was either struggling to dig itself out from the ravages of WWII or colonialism.
I read somewhere that in the 1950’s the U.S. accounted for 80% of global manufacturing output. No one else was in a position to compete with us.
If you were white and male. If you were female or a minority, the employment prospects of today are better today.
I’m still not convinced by your faulty logic, liberals really have a solid grasp on what they want for the economy.
Yes it would be nice if real wages went up for everyone, but what’s the underlying cause of basically 40 years of wage stagnation for the non-wealthy? I don’t know much about what studies have been done on this topic.
I’ve read about the reason the rich are getting richer is that the tax code gives bigger breaks to investment income versus earned income.
Changing the top marginal rate on earned income won’t effect people, who make their living off of investment income.
I think upping capital gains rates would help raise money for reducing the deficit and create a more equitable tax structure, but I don’t see how this would raise wages for people.
Catsy
@gene108:
You’re completely missing the point. Completely and totally.
You attempted to draw a false equivalency between a bunch of common liberal policy positions and the conservative nostalgia for a better time. I disputed this with the point that the liberal positions you’re describing are actual policy positions or goals that can be measured and described in absolute terms. The unemployment rates at a given point in history are a matter of documented fact, not nostalgic speculation. The tax rates at a given point in history and the state of the economy at that time are matters of documented fact. These arguments can be made using evidence and supported or refuted using evidence. Similarly, an increase in union membership is a measurable goal, and the purpose of bringing historical membership numbers into it is not to reminisce about when Things Were Better, it’s to place those numbers in a historical context so that we can evaluate the effect on worker’s rights then and now.
My point was not to engage you in the merits of those positions. My point is that the fact that we can have a factual discussion of those merits at all puts those arguments in a completely different bucket than the nostalgic reminiscence of conservatives who’re butthurt about watching the world change around them. Especially their reminiscence about a time when you didn’t have to lock your doors, when it was safe for your kids to play outside alone, when the American Dream ™ was alive, before society abandoned Family Values ™, or any of the other conservative shibboleths about an America that never actually existed. Those aren’t measurable end-goals or policy prescriptions that can be described in numbers or legislation–they’re fantasies that bear little resemblance to the world that actually was at that time.
eemom
The Lorax was published in 1971. Dr Seuss was a visionary as well as a genius.
I am sorry to hear about his attitude toward Japanese Americans, of course — but in that respect he was no worse than FDR.
Brachiator
@geg6:
How do you know that “where the author is coming from” has anything to do with whatever happens in the novel? Does this mean that you don’t read any books where the author is “anonymous?”
But, but … Dickens is an anti-semite (Fagin in Oliver Twist) and Twain a horrible racist (everything in Huck Finn).
And then we have stuff like The Merchant of Venice. It was originally supposed to be a comedy,but it is difficult read it that way with respect to Shylock, not because of the original context, but because of time and history. The same may be happening with The Taming of the Shrew, which rarely is performed as a total “correction” of Kate. And only Doctor Who knows what Shakespeare meant when he wrote these plays.
@gene108:
Gulliver’s Travels is now often pitched as a children’s book, but was originally taken as a political satire with a bit of a bite. It’s even a politically conservative critique of Robinson Crusoe.
Today we don’t give a fig about Swift’s view of government or his arguments with Defoe.
schrodinger's cat
@Catsy: You are right, but I would like to believe that we can overcome our differences in the future. That’s why I like the Trekkian version of humanity rather than OSC’s version, where we retreat into our own corners.
Also I don’t remember which book in the Ender series this was, but his description of India and Indians was so laughably off base, that I could not take what he said about Chinese or Brazilians or any other nationalities seriously after that.
Brachiator
@asiangrrlMN:
Point taken. I don’t know this graphic novel and will have to check it out. Thanks.
And while there are some books I may tend to avoid because they are particularly vile, I long ago gave up worrying about the beliefs and characters of authors and actors, unless they were especially hideous.
gene108
@Catsy:
I think you make a reality based argument about the social values conservatives keep dreaming about as well. When they talk about family values, you can look up statistics on teen pregnancy rates in the 1950’s, for example and show they were pretty high, even by modern standards. You can also look up polling data about the number of people, who identified themselves as Christian and regular church goers and see that the number is steadily declining.
I just don’t think liberals, who draw the wrong conclusions from the post-World War II economy are doing something significantly superior to conservatives, who draw the wrong conclusions about how great things were in the “Leave It to Beaver days”.
There’s a desire to go back to something, where you felt more safe and secure than you do today, though you may not actually be more safe or secure, depending on a variety of factors.
I guess we may just end up disagreeing on this point…
TR
@gene108:
You think piddling little OSHA safety regulations are more of an intrusion on private industry than the 1950s standard?
Airlines weren’t allowed to set their own prices, for just one instance, and yet this heavy hand of government intrusion meant annual growth rates of 15% or more. (Today, in the glorious age of deregulation, it’s 8%-9% annually.)
And government regulation of the economy in the 1940s and 1950s absolutely dwarfed anything you’d see from the EPA today. Go read up on the Office of Price Administration in the late 1940s and the Office of Price Stabilization during — you guessed it — the early 1950s, to see what REAL government regulation looked like.
I actually agree with you on this.
The reason I spoke about the top marginal tax rate and unemployment in the 1950s is because those were the examples you yourself raised about how liberals were mistaken about the 1950s. Sorry, but don’t move the goalposts and then complain to me for answering the issues you raised yourself.
gene108
@Brachiator:
When Disney turns something into an animated movie, it moves from the realm of adult literature into a children’s classic.
Gravenstone
I blame the Ingalls side of the family tree, since I have Wilders in my own tree on my mother’s side.
TR
@eemom:
How does that make him a visionary? Silent Spring was already a sensation a decade before that.
Hell, even Nixon proclaimed the first Earth Day in 1970.
gene108
@TR:
How much of it was a response to the after effects of returning the U.S. economy from the, literal, war footing it was on from 1942-1945 to a civilian economy?
I know in 1946, there was a high level of unemployment as 16 million servicemen (out of a total population of 176 million) had to be reintegrated to civilian life.
Anyway, I’ll read up, but I’m sure there were some cost savings for industry in being able to dump wastes into rivers rather than having to treat them.
Expansion of airports into smaller markets and better technology (bigger airplanes, for example) probably could account for this growth rate, versus any particular government regulation.
Nutella
@gene108:
I had to stop with the Harry Potter books, too, when I got to the one about Hermione trying to set up an organization to help the downtrodden house elves while everyone else rolled their eyes and said things like “They’re not really people” and “They don’t feel things like we do”. Ugh.
Brachiator
@gene108:
The Fleischer Brothers got there first in 1939. Oddly enough, it was a critique of Disney.
TR
@gene108:
Perhaps you misunderstand me.
I’m not saying that there’s a direct correlation between high tax rates for the rich and low unemployment, but I keep hearing from conservatives that there’s a direct correlation between high tax rates for the rich and high unemployment.
Likewise, I’m not saying that there’s a direct correlation between strong government regulation of the economy and high profits for private business, but again, I keep hearing from conservatives that there’s a direct correlation between strong government regulation and low profits.
On both of these points, every single bit of economic data we have — from the 1950s to the 2000s — points the other way. If there is a correlation between top marginal tax rates and unemployment, it’s the opposite of what the GOP insists. And if there is a correlation between government regulation and overall economic health, it’s the opposite of what the GOP insists.
Catsy
@gene108:
I do, and you do, but they don’t. That’s the whole point here: advocating the benefit of, say, returning to the tax rates of X point in time is a falsifiable argument based on numbers and facts. Complaints about “family values” and how things were nonspecifically “better” at some point in the past aren’t, regardless of whether or not they can be countered with factual arguments like the teen pregnancy statistics you cited.
I don’t think we disagree a bit about the merits of these respective positions, but I do think you’re flogging the “both sides do it” meme where it isn’t at all apt or appropriate.
alwhite
@gene108:
But the difference would be that I could provide many significant statistics to show that workers, average Americans, were much better off with more unions, higher income tax (and lower payroll taxes as they were pre-Reagan), more government control and oversite than we are today. I would not suggest that 1950-1980 were perfect but I could produce evidence that they were superior to today in many significant ways.
Whereas I can show a correlation between union membership and average income and benefits those others cannot.
Jeanne ringland
@theturtlemoves: Have you heard him speak? He’s absolutely hysterical. At first when you meet him he just seems like a shy little man with a small speech impediment: some of his R’s are almost W’s. After he talks for about two minutes you’re hooked.
We first heard him speak in Pasadena at a booksigning when Thud came out in 2005. Since then he has been diagnosed with Early-Onset Alzheimers and his speaking engagements have changed a little but he is still Terry. Sir Terry.
He will be in Madison Wisconsin this summer for the North American Disc World Convention, which is just an excuse to drink and dress up silly for four days, and laugh. The proceeds are split between the Orangutan Foundation and The Alzheimers Research Trust.
Gina
LHOP is definitely an in-group thing among lots of the homeschoolers we know. Some are paleo-conservatives, some are just granolas with a back-to-the-land fantasy. All with White People Problems.
Jeanne ringland
@Gina: That’s kind of funny that they have gained this kind of following. My extreme Lefty-Liberal Auntie (we were not but apparently I am now, and I just thought I was a moderate Republican but Certain Groups tell me otherwise) gave me the first book when I was 7. Then she sort of forgot who she had given the first one to and gave the rest of the books to my sister, one each year. That was HORRIBLE because I had to wait for my slow-reading sister to finish them before I could read them.
Southern Beale
From the New Yorker link, this piece of history about “Little House On The Prairie” which never made the TV series perhaps explains some of the source of Laura’s Libertarianism:
For some reason I forgot they were squatters and run off …
cckids
@catclub:
Amen. That’s how I came to read Twilight. Though now at least I can snark about it from a base of knowledge. So there’s that.
Gina
@Jeanne ringland: I hate waiting for that. What sucks for me now is waiting for my son to finish things so I can read them, I don’t just grab and hog my kid’s books the way I do anyone who’s an adult. My poor husband has to read quick or mysteriously “lose” the book til I’m finished ;-)
eemom
@TR:
oh, I don’t know….something about putting environmentalist ideals into a brilliant format that children would enjoy and understand?
cckids
@kay: I liked them, too, as a kid. Being from Nebraska, I especially liked The Long Winter. You can feel the cold, the isolation & the cabin fever brewing.
Plus, in that book, Pa shows up to a neighbor’s house & just takes some of their wheat, giving as excuse that his family is starving. Promises to pay them back (and probably did), but no one helped them? Wow, just wow.
Jeanne ringland
@Gina: My husband is a much slower reader than I am and I used to fly through a book he was reading, just borrowing it when he was doing something else. Now that he’s retired I can’t get away with it as easily.
Jeanne ringland
@cckids: The whole town was starving. He took the neighbors’ seed wheat in the book and everyone ate it, and the neighbor was the guy Laura eventually married.
The bit about the train not being able to get through was what got me in that book, and twisting the straw into braided logs so they would burn a little slower, but not much.
As for not being helped by anyone, the whole family was sick with diptheria or something, they thought they got it from eating watermelons, and one of their neighbors came and nursed them.
cckids
@theturtlemoves: Oh, yes. See also The Golden Compass series, by Philip Pullman, who hoped they’d knock Narnia off the reading lists & make kids atheists. But they are incandescently spiritual.
Norsecats
I never understood why Pa left the Big Woods. They had a pretty nice life in western Wisconsin, which has a much more pleasant climate than western Minnesota or South Dakota (Plum Creek or Town on the Prairie). More rain and milder winters, for one.
The whole town would have starved during The Long Winter if Almanzo and Cap Garland hadn’t found the homesteader and convinced him to sell 60 bushels of wheat. Those couple chapters are probably the most exciting part of the books.
bayushi
@Jeanne ringland
Actually, he only took a pailful. Almanzo and Cap Garland went on a nasty, 40 mile trip in below freezing weather to go buy someone else’s seed wheat for a dollar and a quarter a bushel, and then the storeowner who fronted the money tried to charge three dollars a bushel for it, then had it pointed out to him that if he profited off of starving people, he’d lose all the business come spring, so he sold it for a dollar and a quarter a bushel.
(Yes. I did just finish rereading these books two weeks ago, they’re great reading while you’re eating, if you don’t mind reading kids’ books. I don’t mind.)
Hob
@aimai: I’m not going to try to persuade you to read more Card, but for what it’s worth, he’s written a few other books that are humane too. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is almost hippieish, and Lost Boys is remarkably free of violent moralizing considering its subject matter (a Mormon community beset by child murders). Neither are really my favorite books, but they’re interesting. I liked the first few books in the Alvin Maker series too – a very playful approach to alternate history.
Jeanne ringland
@bayushi: I forgot about all of that.
I haven’t read them for years and to tell the truth I have a terrible memory, which is why I can reread a book and it’s almost like reading it for the first time. Hmmm… early onset Alzheimers?
YellowJournalism
Pa Ingalls wanted to go after the homesteader’s rumored seed wheat himself, but it was his wife that stopped him. And the man paid Almanzo Wilder for the bucket he took, and I don’t blame him for doing it, seeing as his entire family was a day away from total starvation. Pa reminds me of the father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because like Johnny Nolan, he’s a dreamer and a bit of a loser, but everyone in his family and community seems to like and respect him despite his faults. (Of course, both stories are told from the eyes of their daughters who idolized them and probably loved them more than anyone else ever did.) And actually, for the times, Pa seemed slightly more progressive than most of his peers. I honestly get the feeling that he would have lived alongside the Native Americans in the second novel if the government had allowed it. (Ma, on the other hand…yikes. “You can’t trust a half-breed.”)
Laura herself was pretty progressive as a young woman. Even as a child, she questioned the role that she had to play as a girl in her society. From coveting a young boy’s copper-toed shoes to the day she tells her fiance that she won’t use the word “obey” in their wedding vows, I feel that there are many instances of Wilder giving her story a feminist slant, whether she intended to or not. It’s pretty plain from the way she structures her stories that the women in those times were more important and more responsible for their families’ survival than most people gave them credit for.
I love these books and always will, despite anything I have learned and will learn about the author’s views at different times in her life. If I rejected every novel or film that I have enjoyed over the years based on the faults of the creators, I would have empty bookshelves and DVD cases. Hell, Robert Deniro just recently embarrassed himself by making a pretty racist joke about his waiters that was a few sentences short of calling them wetbacks, but does that (or the Fockers movies) diminish his amazing performances from the past?
I think most of us despise Ayn Rand’s novels because they’re terribly written and have a vile overall theme. No, it doesn’t help that she was as shitty a human being as she was an author, but if she had written The Raven and it wasn’t being used as the how-to manual for extreme libertarians and the right wing, would we be putting down her work as much as we do? Sarah Palin and some crazy homeschoolers (note: not all are crazy) worship the Little House books. I don’t give a shit. They’re still pretty damn great.
Anne Laurie
@Martin:
If he was like my first reputed ancestor on this side of the Atlantic, he got paid to sign up in place of a well-to-do Northerner with “other priorities”. In those days, the Cheneys and Bushes had to pay off the grunts who did the actual work of defending the empire, rather than just rigging the system so that the Right People could avoid the draft via college exemptions and featherbedding duty in the FANG.
Bloix
The story told in the Little House series is an unrelieved account of deprivation, poverty, and failure. Pa is an antisocial misfit who cannot bear to be near other people and indulges his need for isolation without regard to the needs of his wife and children. Ma is a neurotic who is slowly going mad from loneliness and overwork, lives in fear of rape by wild Indians, and is so sexually repressed that she requires her pre-pubescent daughters to sleep in corsets. The family is never well-fed or well-clothed, usually hungry and cold, and occasionally on the verge of literal starvation. Pa eventually fails completely as a farmer and is forced to move the family to the town of DeSmet, where he is humiliated by having to take work as a laborer building housing for townspeople brought there by the railroad. by the time she is a young teen, Laura must work as a schoolteacher, which she hates, because her parents cannot support her.
You can clearly see the misery, poverty, cold, hunger, loneliness and deprivation of Laura’s childhood when you compare it with the one book in the series that is not about her: Farmer Boy, which is about the childhood of her eventual husband, Almanzo Wilder. Almanzo always has plenty to eat – his family’s meals are described in obsessive detail: loaves of fresh bread eaten with jam and honey, beef, ham, and eggs, potatoes and gravy, pies and cakes, cold milk for the children and coffee for the adults. Almanzo and his family live in a warm, comfortable house, surrounded by friends and neighbors, with animals in the barn, crops in the field, and plenty of wood in the woodlot. He has stout boots and warm clothes. His hard-working parents are pillars of their village community. They are content with their place in the world and do all they can to make sure that Almanzo has a happy childhood.
There’s no way to read Farmer Boy without coming to the conclusion that as an adult Laura Ingalls Wilder had become fully aware of the horrors of her own childhood. How anyone can read the series as a nostalgic revery for a lost golden age is beyond me.