The eruption of the Puyehue volcano in Chile, 870 km. south of Santiago, over the weekend sent a cloud of ash 10 km (6 miles) high complete with volcanic lightning. The combined spectacle provided a field day for photographers.
It turns out that the Vassar cartoon sent in by one of our commenters really was set in the 1930s after all.
The source turns out to be a collection of cartoons humorously depicting college life at Vassar by Jean Anderson (1912?-1994) Class of 1933 and (the better documented) Anne Thorburn Cleveland (1916-2009), Class of 1937, published in 1942.
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Anderson and Cleveland published a second collection together, titled Everything Correlates, in 1946. The two 1940s booklets were probably republished as The Educated Woman in Cartoon and Caption in 1960.
Anderson was a classmate at Vassar of Mary McCarthy, who supplied her own version of life at Vassar in her succèss de scandale novel The Group
I remember a classical mural ornamenting “the Madonna of the Smoking Room” Lakey’s suite, featuring the other seven members of the group, attending the goddess Lakey, drawn by the intelligent and witty Helena. I have always assumed that Helena, the detached observer, was intended to represent McCarthy herself, but perhaps I’ve always been wrong. McCarthy’s classmate Jean Anderson, it seems, had just such a talent for cartoon murals.
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Cleveland went on to contribute cartoons to Ladies’ Home Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines, and published a book of cartoons from the perspective of an American residing in post-war Japan, but eventually abandoned her professional career. She wound up living in Oregon where she created a commune.
Anderson worked as a librarian at Vassar for a number of years, then suddenly resolved on a complete redirection, attended medical school, and became an obstetrician and a pioneer champion of the Lamaze method. She practiced in Manhattan in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, then relocated permanently to Amherst, Massachusetts. Dr. Anderson proudly kept copies of her cartoon collections available to entertain patients in her waiting room.
Blogger Shaenon K. Gentry, Vassar 2000, has published several articles on the Cleveland-Anderson cartoons. Gentry, for some reason, fails to notice that Anderson signs her cartoons, and tends to produce the better work. The Gentry articles talk predominantly about Anne Cleveland.
Walter Russell Mead (who has recently been on a roll, producing a series of very intelligent articles) argues that the imminent end of the entitlement era marks as profound a change in the American way of life as the century ago passing of the family farm and the transition to majority employment in towns and cities.
The death of the family farm didn’t kill the American republic for several reasons. First, to some degree Jefferson was wrong and Hamilton was right. A strong manufacturing and financial sector can strengthen democracy under the right conditions; ancient, slave-holding Rome was less like modern capitalist New York and London than Thomas Jefferson thought.
But under American conditions there was something else: the end of the family farm did not mean the rise of a propertyless proletariat in the United States. Bankers like A.P. Giannini made the argument that the thirty year mortgage was a weapon against Marx: if the average American family no longer owned a farm, it could still own a house.
Thanks to home ownership, post-agricultural America remained a land of mass property ownership and that experience continued to inform American political and social values. American neighborhoods are still schools of political engagement; it’s clear who keeps up their property, who takes the lead in community activities, who leads the PTA and who coaches the youth league. Property ownership continues to serve as a political tutor; American voters want better municipal services, and they don’t like high property taxes. They have to think about the relationship between the two in every election, and their experience in local affairs continues to inform their ideas about national policy.
At the same time, the fact that most Americans buy their homes through mortgages, and that they have to keep those payments up or lose the old homestead, teaches responsibility and steady habits. If the farmer didn’t get up at dawn to plow the north forty, there was nothing to eat in the winter. If the suburbanite doesn’t get in the car and head onto the freeway every morning, the bank balance sinks and the repo men will come and take the house away. Home ownership also teaches people about investments and compound interest (although lately it has been giving us a painful introduction to bubbles and downturns).
Both versions of the American Dream had this in common: the farm in the valley and the box in the burbs helped the American people develop the skills and the values necessary for successful republican government.
From this standpoint, suburban America looks like a watered down but still potent blend of the original American farmer’s republic. The inherited values and culture coming to us from the old days plus the still potent force of mass home ownership have kept the United States from retracing the steps of older democracies on their slow decline. So far.
But our consumer republic is clearly in trouble. Economically, as I wrote earlier this week, the model is breaking down. The consumer republic is based on debt and depends on high consumption. We are nearing the limits of that kind of economy. The country’s external debt, the explosive growth of federal debt and the weak balance sheets of consumer households are all pointing in the same direction.
The cultural and social weaknesses of the consumer state are if anything more troubling. While suburbia is not the kind of alienating horror show that Marxist critics make it out to be, it is a less effective school for citizenship and character than the family farm. Daniel Bell wrote about the cultural contradictions of capitalism more than thirty years ago; life in a consumer society does not support the virtues and ideas that a healthy society requires.
More broadly, Huck Finn was right and the Widow Douglass was wrong: a holistic life in which family, work, education, leisure and production are all blended and mixed is healthier than an existence in which every sphere of life is rigidly set off from the others. it is not good for children to work long hours in textile mills; it is also not good for them to grow up without participating in and learning about the productive labor that is such a big part of what it means to be human. Family bonds are weaker now that husbands and wives spend so much less time together and mostly cooperate to spend money rather than working together to make it. The family is less of a unit because the real business of each member of the family takes place in some other environment be it the office, the factory or the school.
The special shape of modern and suburban family life is part of the blue social model I’ve been posting about on this blog and the hollowing out of blue society is increasingly felt within as well as around the contemporary American family. The suburban consumption based nuclear family is increasingly under stress; family budgets and time are increasingly on the edge.
More, the very entitlements most under pressure economically are those that have allowed the multigenerational family to yield to the suburban nuclear idyll. Defined benefit pensions, Social Security, home equity and Medicare allowed older Americans to live independent lives and reduced the need for solidarity between the generations. The generations, like the widow’s vittles, were all cooking in their separate pots. ...
The one thing I do know is that change is on its way — more fundamental, more challenging, and also perhaps more exhilarating than many of us are ready for. The health of the American economy is going to require us to move away from the credit card economics of the consumer republic. The health of American society and democracy require that we move beyond the life of the last eighty years.
The Worcester College disciplinary crackdown story inspired one of our readers to forward the cartoon below. JKB describes it as depicting Vassar in the 1930s, but I think it looks more like the 1950s.
Mark Steyn is sharp-tongued as ever on the topic of the week: the latest scandal-mired abrasive, self-righteous, egomanaical, ultra-liberal democrat.
And so it goes after another tumultuous week in American politics. Nearly a third of homeowners are “underwater” – that’s to say, they owe more on their mortgages than the property is worth. Private-sector job growth has all but vanished. The House of Representatives voted not to raise the debt ceiling.
But as the debt ceiling subsides – or, at any rate, stays put – we see the dreary steeple of Anthony Weiner emerging from his Twitpic crotch shot.
For the benefit of the few remaining American coeds Rep. Weiner isn’t following on Twitter, the congressman’s initial position when his groin Tweet went viral was that his Twitter had been hacked. Could happen to anyone. ...
Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere “prank” involving a “randy photo” (his words) was an “unfortunate distraction” from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to “get back to work for the American people.”
It’s the political class doing all this relentless “work for the American people” that’s turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet, killed the American Dream and left the American people headed for a future poised somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. So, if it’s a choice between politicians getting back to work for the American people or Tweeting their privates round the planet, I say, Tweet on, MacDuff.
The Daily Mail reports that Worcester College, Oxford (Rupert Murdoch’s alma mater) is attempting to suppress some undergraduate examination period hijinks.
Worcester College was founded in the 18th century, but incorporates portions of Gloucester College, a Benedictine foundation dating to 1283, dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539.
Undergraduates at Worcester College have been threatened with disciplinary action if they continue removing their tops in the library on Wednesday afternoons.
A group of students calling themselves the Breakfast Club started stripping off in 2009 to brighten up boring revision days.
Up to 40 male and female students became involved in the group action for a 30-minute period between 3pm and 4pm every Wednesday
They carry on their work partly-clothed – some of the girls are even said to have removed their bras.
However high-profile visitors including heads of state regularly visit the library as part of a tour of the university, and there have been a string of complaints.
Librarians sent an email to the college saying the practice was ‘unacceptable’ and ‘a distraction to other readers’.
In their email to students, the library committee warned: ‘While half-naked half-hour may have seemed like a piece of harmless fun, we ask you please to stop this kind of behaviour in the library.
‘If inappropriate behaviour continues, library staff will refer the matter to the Dean.
(or woman) who does not possess the same conventional pop culture familiarity with Longfellow’s poem and Paul Revere’s 18th of April in ‘75 ride to warn the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord that the British were coming.
Sarah Palin, unfortunately, in her characteristically more extreme version of the politician trying to bloviate for the media who engages mouth without fully engaging brain, made a syntactical hash of Paul Revere’s ride and laid herself open to accusations by the left that she was astonishingly ill-informed on supposed fine points of America history with which every member of the elite community of fashion is naturally intimately familiar.
A bit painful to watch, but short.
All the glee on the left provoked the learned Professor Jacobson to quote Revere’s actual account, which by one of life’s strange coincidences happened to fit Sarah Palin’s garbled narrative very nicely. It was all just more persiflage, of course. Palin really did misspeak, but the good Professor’s factual rejoinder quite effectively disarmed the smug lefties and drove them into full retreat, muttering unhappily to themselves. Bill Jacobson decisively closed down discussion on this particular incident.
The reality is that Sarah Palin obviously knows approximately as much (or as little) as any typical contemporary American adult about Paul Revere’s ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord. What happened is that Palin tried to combine more than one conceptual thread while distracted, and tied her verbiage into knots. When she is not paying attention, Sarah Palin does not express herself coherently and does not necessarily say what she means to say. Instead, she produces some kind of untidy substitute for what she needed and intended to say, and the result is too commonly a very unsatisfactory and naive sounding failure featuring some form of gaping vulnerability.
Palin is not as glib as many politicians, and she is not as careful as most politicians, so she has a well-recognized tendency to expose herself to this kind of unfavorable interpretation and ridicule from the left.
All politicians are fallible and human, and all politicians are capable of misspeaking when not paying attention, tired, or distracted.
Palin is not unusually ill-informed or even uniquely capable of gaffes. She is just not as cautious and characteristically self-protective as most politicians. There is no doubt, though, that her proclivity toward verbal confusion and gaffes is a serious weakness and a great vulnerability. Her credibility as a presidential candidate rests on her successfully making the effort to overcome these kinds of weaknesses. If Palin isn’t willing or able to improve, she is not going to be nominated.
In 1857, Muslim and Hindu sepoys mutinied in India because cartridges for the Pattern 1853 Enfield Rifle were greased with tallow which was believed to be composed of a mixture of beef and pork fat, contact with which would cause the Hindus to lose caste and the Muslims to forfeit their access to Paradise.
The Daily Mail reports that a small American firm producing special gun lubricants is claiming that Osama bin Laden will not be entering the Mussulman’s Paradise or receiving any 72 virgins.
Was Osama bin Laden shot with a bullet soaked in pork fat, denying him a place in paradise?
Yes, if one rather shady website, that peddles gun oil containing liquefied pig fat, is to be believed.
The makers of Silver Bullet Gun Oil claim it contains 13 per cent USDA liquefied pig fat thus making the product ‘a highly effective counter-Islamic terrorist force multiplier.’
The apparent owner of the gun oil site, who goes by the name ‘The Midnight Rider,’ explains how the pig fat will transfer onto anything the bullet strikes.
This ‘effectively denies entry to Allah’s paradise to an Islamo-fascist terrorist,’ Rider adds.
The oil, which costs $8.95 for 4oz, apparently puts the ‘fear of death into them (terrorists)’.
In Islam consumption of pork is forbidden, but the Quran also states that if one is forced to consume the meat then they are guiltless and therefore not disqualified from paradise.
The website also notes its customers include members of the U.S. military.
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Silver Bullet Gun Oil web-site
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I wish I owned shares in Silver Bullet Gun Oil, because sales are definitely going to skyrocket as the word of the availability of this useful product gets around.
Church of the Holy Redeemer, built 1035 to house a fragment of the True Cross.
I had not ever hear of the abandoned city of Ani until seeing Boogie Man’s photoessay.
Ani, located in Eastern Turkey, was in the 10th Century the capital of an Armenian principality. In its prime, the city’s population was similar in size (100,000—200,000) to Constantinople, Baghdad, and Cairo. It became the seat of the Catholicoi, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church in 992.
Ani was sacked by the Seljuk Turks in 1064, and by the Mongols in 1236. The city declined over subsequent centuries, ceasing to be a dynastic capitol around 1400, and losing the Armenian Catholicosate in 1441. Ani gradually dwindled to a small settlement within the walls of the former city, and was completely abandoned by the 18th century.
The site was excavated and documented by the Russian linguist and archaeologist Nicholas Marr 1892-93 and 1904-17.
In Alameda, California, on Memorial Day, public employees hid behind regulations and protocols and blamed insufficient funding for training and special equipment as they stood by passively on the beach and allowed a suicidal man to drown himself in San Francisco Bay. Ordinary Californians (unhampered by policy and regulations) managed to stand by as well. In the end, however, an unauthorized and untrained civilian lacking funding and special equipment did swim out and retrieve the body.
Israeli Strategic Studies professor Barry Rubin recently visited the United States and experienced with the freshness of an outsider’s perspective the intensity of the indoctrination which has become a constant feature of American life.
What’s most scary in America today may be the deficit and it may be government policies, but for me the scariest thing is the way that traditional American pragmatism, an open-minded search for truth, the reliability of the media and of academia, has virtually disappeared in many cases.
I’m talking here about the media, academia, and the highly publicized public debate, not what all of the people are thinking. Clearly, a lot of people aren’t buying the conventional wisdom. But the important point is that it is the conventional wisdom, the main ideas held by the elite and government, what young people are being taught, and probably pretty much everything half of the population is hearing. I was in California, Iowa, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, Florida, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, and other places.
While this certainly doesn’t apply to all schools, the indoctrination that I’ve seen in one elementary school shocked me. If you really hear what eleven-year-olds are saying to each other you’d be amazed: accusing each other of being racists at the drop of a hat; thinking man-made global warming is a threat to their personal survival into adulthood; viewing America as evil.
If that happens in an educational system — especially in universities — indoctrination means that the more “educated” someone is, the more “stupid” they become.
The decline of professional ethics — journalists are supposed to be accurate and fair despite their personal views; professors should seek truth wherever that leads them, be open-minded, and represent accurately sources and evidence — is staggering. Large numbers of ideas are practically barred from the mass media; silly concepts are put forward that have huge holes in them but are protected from scrutiny or criticism. Some people or movements are always ridiculed; others are always exalted.
There are hundreds of examples of how this works and I see it every day. ...
No matter how bad the economic situation, leadership, or policies might be, a country can recover if the people and elite are able to define the real problems and the real solutions. If the connection with reality is lost, all hope is gone. That is one of the Middle East’s central problems. Increasingly, it seems to be Europe and America’s problem, too.
The way cults work is to isolate people from reality and bombard them with a single viewpoint. The victim is cut off from other influences by being told that they are evil and thus to be disregarded. In some ways, that is what’s been happening to America in recent years.
One weakness of this structure is that the arguments it makes and the claims puts forward are so ridiculous that if exposed to articulate and reasoned responses — often, even for a mere sixty-second period — it quickly collapses logically. Its strength is that it has such strong defenses against such exposure.
Another weakness is that the use of institutions for politically motivated exploitation must remain invisible. If someone understands that universities, mass media, and other trusted institutions have been distorted out of their historical, democratic, and American norms then that’s the beginning of seeing through deception.
Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas contended in his Milliman Lecture (.pdf), delivered May 19th at the University of Washington, that US economic growth has been roughly a consistent 3% per year over the last two centuries. There have been deviations from the pattern as a result of wars and financial downturns, but the American economy has consistently returned to the same trend line.
The recession which began in 2008, however, seems possibly to represent a fundamental change. Economic activity has not resumed growth. We have not returned to our customary trend line.
Instead, policies adopted by the Obama Administration and the democrat party congress elected in 2008 may have systematically reduced the American rate of economic growth to levels comparable to those of major European countries.
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You or I read all this and shudder at the terrible news, but the progressive Matthew Yglesias basically accepts Lucas’s analysis and sees this as cause for awarding Obama laurels.
[A]ccording to Lucas, is that Obama’s policies have caused us to deviate permanently to a lower, European-style growth path. The initiation of Social Security didn’t do that. Nor did its expansion in the 1950s. Nor did the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, Title I federal aid to schools or the War On Poverty. The Clean Air Act didn’t do it. Nor did the Clean Water Act or the Americans With Disabilities Act. George W Bush’s expansion of Medicare didn’t do it. Nothing about the growth of the welfare state in postwar America was able to jar America off the American-style growth path and put it on the European path. And then along came Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act and a few other bills, and like magic we’re Sweden. Forget the economic implications of this. Think about the history! Think about all the unfair knocks Obama’s gotten from the left. A leading economic scholar thinks Obama’s domestic agenda has been far-and-away the most consequential in American history. It’s kind of a big deal.
In other words, when we look around at the ruins of the US economy, the devastated housing market, massive unemployment, a crisis forcing Americans to reduce their life-styles and expectations, a shrinking economy, the financial industry departing overseas, the possible end of the US dollar as reserve currency, and a forced American retreat from military investment and commitments, as most of America despairs, we find the American left rejoicing over the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams.
If there was ever any question as to what the left’s agenda was ultimately directed, as to exactly what its goal really was, well, now you know.
The Wall Street Journal finds Senator Chuck Schumer’s recent criticism of the regulatory impact on New York City’s financial industry of the Dodd-Frank bill, which he himself supported, to be an example of a recognizable pattern of political deception.
[W]ith Mr. Schumer, who voted to inflict this burden on an economy still struggling with high unemployment and slow growth, this is an all-too familiar pattern of behavior that can be summarized as follows:
Step One: Vote for destructive law.
Step Two: Complain about said law, while doing nothing to repeal it.
Step Three: Raise campaign money by showing to business community the volume of said complaints.
It was almost easy to forget that Mr. Schumer helped enact the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley financial accounting law when he spent much of the rest of the decade complaining about the stifling burden of financial regulations.
Looking forward, we can expect Mr. Schumer to express at myriad fundraising events his sympathy for those living with the consequences of Dodd-Frank. It’s a good bet that he’ll also claim that, if not for his valiant efforts on Capitol Hill, the financial reform would have been so much worse. And expect New York’s financial elite to keep writing checks.
There’s a word for people who keep falling for this: suckers.
