Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Alex is writing every day at Salon -- but as it states, that was a
piece that took more time and collaboration. It has already gotten over
140 posts in response.  
  

    
It's very much worth reading and evolving into a position paper.
  

    
Yes, it is.   
  

    
Hah, sorry everyone -- as you see, I'm busy writing!

I did get the title from Zinn. I went back to his People's History
(which I admit I hadn't read closely since senior year in high school)
for inspiration. Obviously it's hard to ape the 'style' of a book that
uses so many primary sources when you're making stuff up but it was on
my desk as I wrote. (Helped me to remember the rich history of
union-busting governors who went on to the presidency, too.)

I probably actually borrowed the most from Cleon Skousen's "The 5,000
Year Leap." He's Glenn Beck's favorite pseudo-historian and his work
explains a lot of contemporary conservative beliefs about our history.
Alex Zaitchik wrote about him a couple years back at Salon:

http://www.salon.com/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/

There's a very huge interest in American history underlying the
conservative movement -- Founder-worship and carrying around copies of
the Constitution and Glenn Beck telling people to read the Federalist
Papers -- but anti-academia's baked into the entire enterprise, which
means complete quacks like Skousen can become very, very influential.
It can seem like some movement conservatives are writing these
alternate histories as an effort to build a parallel scholarship, like
they built an alternative conservative newsmedia with talk radio and
right-wing blogs and Fox. (Something like Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal
Fascism" seems like a perverse parody of an actual scholarly work --
it's got pages and pages of footnotes but it's a completely incoherent
reading of history, because it was actually just designed to... call
liberals the "real fascists.") And that's sort of the mindset I tried
to get into -- "correcting the record," and blithely interpreting all
historical issues through the frame of modern political debates.

(Thanks so much for the kind words on the declaration too, everyone.)
  

    

Hasn't the entire right-wing movement been on a parallel track since the
1980s with the home schooling and fundamentalist history and science books
and their law schools?

The Salon article is great.  Thank you.

I have one small quibble and that is about the Frank Ogawa Plaza and the 
man for which it was named.  Ogawa was a Japanese-American, never lived 
in Japan, but was incarcerated with his family during WWII.  He was the 
first Japanese-American to serve on the Oakland City Council and did so 
for many years.  The Frank Ogawa Plaza was named in his honor and I 
believe his name should indeed be honored.
  

    
The actual claims of people like Skousen and Jonah Goldberg are only
slightly less absurd than the claims in your book.
  

    
Alex, I was just looking at Justin Elliot's story about the Tea Party
and OWS: 

http://salon.com/2011/10/02/tea_party_and_gop_split_on_occupy_wall_street/

Reading it I realize that I don't know what we mean when we say "Tea
Party" these days.  I have the birth-legend, where a populist group was
then either embraced or co-opted by large numbers of GOP faithful, and
began to overlap older groups of the "far right" such as the
Dittoheads.  But I don't really have a definition for what that means
now. There seems to be such a crossover into the mainstream of the GOP,
and I wonder how the candidates are surveying those lines. What do
their pollsters ask their people?

My old lazy short-hand was "people who like Palin,"  but that is
dated, of course. Is it now "people who don't like Romney?"  Reading
the article, I wondered, how would you describe the indicators of the
group that identifies as members of the Tea Party now?   
  

    
Gail, that's a very difficult question. There are the people who, say,
self-identify as Tea Partiers to pollsters, and the people who work
with actual organized Tea Party groups, and then you have, like, Ron
Paul supporters.

You could maybe define TP very broadly as "people who like Herman
Cain," right now? The term has become a catch-all for "conservative
Republicans," which is accurate enough when you're dealing with
journalistic shorthand descriptions of the primary electorate but
definitely inexact.

I think on the whole we're talking about a subsection of conservatives
who are more militant and less willing to "settle" for ideologically
impure Republican candidates than your average "base" voter. The best
example is probably the mostly Freshman "Tea Party" Republicans in the
House, who regularly rebel against party leadership.

wickett, yes -- evangelicals pioneered this work in the 1980s. It's
just remarkable how much it spread. A conservative can easily only
consume conservative media (except perhaps when they want to go to a
movie, those right-wing film projects are usually pretty bad). 
  

    

Thirty years from President Jimmy Carter to Herman Cain seeking the job--a 
mere one generation.  I am loath to call it education, but right-wing 
propaganda from kids' picture books through graduate textbooks has 
certainly been effective.

How do we counter it?

Problem with satire is that the propagandized may take it as truth.
  

    
That's a good question.  

How do you compete with a fantasy narrative of historical
justification?

One of the things that makes it hard to compete is that a fantasy can
be shaped to precise political ends, while actual history is messy and
ambiguous.
  

    
I think satire is one handy weapon in the fight against bad history --
it both educates reasonable people as to what these right-wing
revisionists actually believe (which is often very surprising to people
who had a regular education) and makes their mistruths look ridiculous
instead of compelling. Though movement conservatives gain some psychic
strength from being laughed at, it's better to point out their
silliness than to take them incredibly seriously. (Michele Bachmann's
core supporters love her all the more every time the liberal media
takes a shot, but her poll numbers suggest that the shots worked.)

But in the battle of messy, ambiguous history and simplistic
propaganda propaganda often has a pretty significant advantage. I dunno
what the answer is, beyond more and better education for all.
  

    
Stephen Colbert is an interesting one in how he plays the ambiguity
problems.  His liberal audience knows he is liberal, but conservative
viewers like a lot of his jokes.  It's all very
through-the-looking-glass watching him give a Republican "friend of the
show" the "Colbert bump."  (There was research done on how he is
interpreted - http://www.alternet.org/media/137918 and it confirmed
each person's views.)  

Alex, I get why you would want to stay in character with the book
descriptions for aesthetic reasons, but at what part in the
marketing/sales dance can you do a wink-wink and confirm it's a joke? I
think that is useful for all those who have seen a lot of far-fetched
actual propaganda, and are hesitant, but testing that theory would be
the only way to know.  Is making it clear that it is a joke an element
in making or not making the sale on the e-books pages?
  

    
I've heard that Colbert is popular among conservatives though Jon
Stewart isn't. I think his satire seems like truth to them, and they
like it.
  

    
I also agree that more and better education is a key - although I note
that history is not even one of the core subjects under No Child Left
Behind.

One of the strengths of the sort of history as propaganda which Alex
parodies is that the average person emerges from school with a grab bag
of half-grasped facts and little connecting them.  When that's all
people have, creating a narrative can be very powerful.  

I once rode on a bus with a group of people who had just attended
their first Nation of Islam meeting.  This was a quite a while ago, and
they got the full dose of goofy NOI history, with the white race being
invented by evil scientists, etc.  The narrative made even Alex's
parody of TP history sound very sensible, but boy where these guys
stoked.  They finally had a handle on things - or so they felt.

Basically, if you don't supply good narratives, phony narratives will
fill the gap.
  

    

I, alas, have not read your e-book.

Your target market is reasonable people who need / are seeking to learn
about the right-wing agenda, is that correct?
  

    
(Meanwhile, Alex has a working-without-a-net excerpt up today on
Salon: No "Satire" label showing.  

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/08/andrew_jackson_original_teabagger/

So there is already a comment that says 
>Excuse me, please, Alex.
>Andrew Jackson did not have a wooden leg. He was called "Old Hickory"
because he was as tough as a hickory tree.
>Never did I hear growing up about a wooden leg. You are misinformed.
>To verify his nickname, call the Hermitage in Nashville and speak with
the curator. Tel. 615 889 2941.

Oh my!)
  

    
You know, all satire aside, Andrew Jackson really was the original
Teabagger.  All the tropes are there.  Hillbilly roots, not much in the
way of book learning, hated those stinkin' urban elites (even if the
urbs were a little tiny by modern standards).  Hated banks and the
finance industry of the day (even a stopped clock...).  Took a firm
stand against those illegal alien redskin types.  Had a somewhat
idiosyncratic interpretation of the Constitution.
  

    
and didn't he originate the national debt?
  

    
IMHO Jackson was the worst President ever.
  

    
Passing over the non-entities, he would be tied for worst with Woodrow
Wilson for me - although it's disturbed me that I have an un-favorite
President in common with Glenn Beck!
  

    
Hah, I got a few emails about the wooden leg thing, actually -- one
from a very polite gentleman who followed up with a second email after
he "got the joke," so to speak.

I've always thought that a big old "satire" label sort of kills the
joke, but I've known very few editors who agreed with me on that one. I
like to assume readers are smart enough to get it (though of course
when even a smart reader is led astray, that's probably the satirist's
fault).

My worst president is PROBABLY Buchanan but Wilson is up there.
Harding was awful but at least not a racist.
  

    
Gail -- not sure if I entirely answered your question actually but I
should note that I'm awful as promotion and marketing! It IS filed
under "humor" on Amazon, though. You could definitely be right that
liberal readers are passing it by as a "real" right-wing book -- I may
look into doing something to make the joke a bit clearer.

Andrew Jackson is such an amazing figure -- a horrible genocidal
racist who also basically opened up participation in American
governance to the masses for the first time. His killing the National
Bank was the populist move, but it ended up destabilizing the economy
for years. He was seriously on the side of the little guy, versus the
elites, but "the little guy" was white men only, and he totally
pioneered exploiting the racial paranoia of white men for political
gain. Plus that huge wheel of cheese...
  

    
Yes, but at least it wasn't brie...

I keep hoping we'll get populism without the insanity that generally
seems to come with it.

Harding seemed grotesquely incompetent, but also seems to have been a
fairly nice guy - and perhaps not entirely aware of what a bunch of
crooks he was hanging out with.  In addition to his racial tolerance,
he also freed Eugene Debs, who had been imprisoned for general
insolence by Woodrow Wilson.
  

    
I want to thank Alex, Mark and everyone else who contributed to this
conversation over the past two weeks. Inkwell.vue turns its attention
to a new conversation today, however, as always, this topic will remain
open indefinitely for any further comments or discussion.

Thanks again for an interesting discussion.
  

    
Mark is of course right about Harding, though the only thing I recall
having learned about him in school was the rumor that he died while...
romancing a mistress. (I learned this from a nerdy friend, not a
textbook).

Thanks everyone!