Or as we say in Texas, ‘Guten Tag, y’all!”
Sgt. Mom
RuiNation
So a little over six weeks to go until Election Day; I guess we can call this the final heat. Texas is pretty much a red state stronghold, although there are pockets of blue adherents throughout. Yes, even in my neighborhood, there are a handful of defiant Obama-Biden yard signs visible, although outnumbered at least two to one by Romney-Ryan signs. It amounts to about a dozen, all told; I think that most of my neighbors prefer keeping their political preferences this time around strictly to themselves.
History Friday – American Century Mass Cas
I can pretty well figure out the source of my interest in 19th century American history; some of it can be blamed on the Little House Books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. But the larger portion can be laid squarely at the foot of my mother’s subscription to American Heritage Magazine. Which she still has, but the magazine is a pale, paltry and advertisement-poxed version of what it was when Mom first began subscribing, shortly after the beginning of the magazine itself. There were only a handful of the very earliest, dawn-of-time-issues which I did not know very, very well. It was a bi-monthly, or quarterly hard-back publication, with no advertisements and articles by serious, well-respected if seemingly obscure historians who managed to be interesting without being the least bit sensational. I have the impression that most of them were passionately interested in their topic – whatever it might be, and wrote with enthusiasm equal to their knowledge of subject. The articles were well-illustrated with contemporary art or historic photographs, or an appealing mix of modern photographs, drawings and artifacts. I couldn’t have imagined a better introduction to the vagaries of our national history.
Archive Post – The Poisoned Pool
(In light of the recent release of Gallup survey results indicating that an embarrassingly large portion of the American public has little trust in the news media, I present a reprise post from the Daily Brief, circa 2005, when the rot had already well set in, but wasn’t yet screamingly obvious.)
In the twilight afterglow of the Edward Murrow era of journalism, the only people that I remember routinely complaining about bias, selective reporting, or outright lies in journalism – print and broadcast both— were of the far-right-over-the-horizon John Birch Society persuasion, sourly grumbling about creeping godless communism (or maybe it was godless creeping communism) at cocktail parties or in letters to the editor. Considering that John Reed and Walter Duranty, among others, made careers out of painting world socialism in far more sunny colors than completely unbiased and disinterested journalism required, I have to concede that those doughty anti-communists of my youth may have had a point. But on the whole, it was a given that the main-stream media outlets of the American mid-century had enormous stores of credibility with the public.
History Friday: The English Visitor
You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
The English visitor, a lawyer and pamphleteer named Nicholas Doran Maillard landed up in Texas early in 1840, when the Republic of Texas had just achieved four years of perilous existence . . . and inadvertently provided the means for an exception to Humbert Wolfe’s stinging epigram. In that year, Texas was perennially cash-broke but land rich, somewhat quarrelsome, and continually scourged by Comanche depredations from the north and west, and the threat of re-occupation by Mexico from the south, Texans had first seen immediate annexation by the United States as their sure and certain refuge. But alas, that slavery was permitted and practiced within Texas – so annexation was blocked by abolitionists.
This left the Republic seeking recognition and even strong allies elsewhere, namely with France and Britain – neither of whom particularly approved of the ‘peculiar institution’ but were more than willing to play the great game of international politics, especially if a foothold on the North American continent might come out of it. Both England and France eventually recognized the independent Republic; Sam Houston cannily referred to it all as a flirtation, in order to reinforce the relationship with the United States.